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Credential Management

Cluster API Provider Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (CAPX) interacts with Nutanix Prism Central (PC) APIs to manage the required Kubernetes cluster infrastructure resources.

PC credentials are required to authenticate to the PC APIs. CAPX currently supports two mechanisms to supply the required credentials:

  • Credentials injected into the CAPX manager deployment
  • Workload cluster specific credentials

Credentials injected into the CAPX manager deployment

By default, credentials will be injected into the CAPX manager deployment when CAPX is initialized. See the getting started guide for more information on the initialization.

Upon initialization a nutanix-creds secret will automatically be created in the capx-system namespace. This secret will contain the values supplied via the NUTANIX_USER and NUTANIX_PASSWORD parameters.

The nutanix-creds secret will be used for workload cluster deployment if no other credential is supplied.

Example

An example of the automatically created nutanix-creds secret can be found below: 

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
type: Opaque
metadata:
  name: nutanix-creds
  namespace: capx-system
stringData:
  NUTANIX_USER: "<nutanix-user>"
  NUTANIX_PASSWORD: "<nutanix-password>"

Workload cluster specific credentials

Users can override the credentials injected in CAPX manager deployment by supplying a credential specific to a workload cluster. The credentials can be supplied by creating a secret in the same namespace as the NutanixCluster namespace.

The secret can be referenced by adding a credentialRef inside the prismCentral attribute contained in the NutanixCluster. The secret will also be deleted when the NutanixCluster is deleted.

Note: There is a 1:1 relation between the secret and the NutanixCluster object.

Example

Create a secret in the namespace of the NutanixCluster:

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: "<my-secret>"
  namespace: "<nutanixcluster-namespace>"
stringData:
  NUTANIX_PASSWORD: "<nutanix-password>"
  NUTANIX_USER: "<nutanix-user>"

Add credentialRef to the NutanixCluster:

apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: NutanixCluster
metadata:
  name: "<nutanixcluster-name>"
  namespace: "<nutanixcluster-namespace>"
spec:
  prismCentral:
    credentialRef:
      name: "<my-secret>"
      kind: Secret
...