Authorization
Much like authentication, Spinnaker allows for a variety of pluggable authorization mechanisms. This page shows how to setup and configure Fiat, Spinnaker’s authorization microservice.
Model and features
Fiat’s authorization model is a whitelist that is open by default. In other words, when a resource does not define who is allowed to access it, it is considered unrestricted.
With Fiat, you can…
- Restrict access to specific accounts.
- Restrict access to specific applications.
- Run pipelines using automated triggers against access-controlled applications.
- Use and periodically update user roles from a backing role provider.
Requirements
-
Authentication successfully setup in Gate.
-
Configured Front50 to use S3 or Google Cloud Storage (GCS) as the backing storage mechanism for persistent application configurations.
- An external role provider from one of the following:
- Google Groups via a G Suite Account
- With access to the G Suite Admin console
- GitHub Team
- LDAP server
- SAML Identity Provider (IdP) that includes groups in the assertion
SAML roles are fixed at login time, and cannot be changed until the user needs to reauthenticate.
- Google Groups via a G Suite Account
-
Patience—there are a lot of small details that must be just right with anything related to authentication and authorization.
- (Highly Suggested) All Spinnaker component microservices are either:
-
Firewalled off as a collective group, or:
-
Use mutual TLS authentication:
-
Restrictable resources
Accounts and applications access control can be confusing unless you understand the core relationship: accounts can contain multiple applications, and applications can span multiple accounts.
Accounts
In the dark ages (before Fiat), only accounts could be restricted. Because Clouddriver is the source of truth for accounts, Fiat reaches out to Clouddriver to gather the list of available accounts.
There are two types of access restrictions to an account, READ
and WRITE
. Users must have
at least one READ
permission of an account to view the account’s cloud resources, and at least one
WRITE
permission to make changes to the resources.
These halyard commands manage the READ
and WRITE
permissions.
PROVIDER= # Your cloud provider
hal config provider $PROVIDER account edit $ACCOUNT \
--add-read-permission role1 \ # Adds a READ permission
--add-write-permission role2 \ # Adds a WRITE permission
--remove-read-permission role3 \ # Removes a READ permission
--remove-write-permission role4 # Removes a WRITE permission
# Alternatively, you can overwrite the whole read or write list, comma delimited.
hal config provider $PROVIDER account edit $ACCOUNT \
--read-permissions role1,role2,role3 \
--write-permissions role1,role2,role3
(Deprecated) requiredGroupMembership
is the old way to add access restrictions to an account.
This method does not distinguish between READ
and WRITE
- users with access will have both.
Applications
Set permissions for an existing application using the application configuration:

Unrestricted accounts and applications
It’s important to understand what may happen if you leave either an account or application without any configured permissions.
- If an account is unrestricted, any user with access to Spinnaker can deploy a new application to that account.
- If an application is unrestricted, any user with access to Spinnaker can deploy that application into a different account. They may also be able to see basic information like instance names and counts within server groups.
Effects of restrictions
Because of the new access restrictions, https://localhost:9000/#/applications
should no longer
list applications that have been restricted. Even navigating to the previously accessible page
should be denied:
Automated pipeline triggers
A popular feature in Spinnaker is the ability to run pipelines automatically based on a
triggering event, such as a git push
or a Jenkins build completing. When pipelines run against
accounts and applications that are protected, it is necessary to configure
them with enough permissions to access those protected resources. This can
be done in two ways:
- Using Pipeline Permissions
- Using a Fiat service account
Role providers
To configure an external role provider, follow one of the instructions below: