kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2332 stars · 453 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A tool that lets users authenticate to Kubernetes clusters using AWS IAM credentials instead of separate certificates or tokens. It runs as a server (typically a DaemonSet) that validates IAM-signed tokens for the Kubernetes API server, and ships a client for generating those tokens for kubectl.

Use cases

• authenticate to kubernetes cluster with aws iam credentials
• avoid managing separate kubernetes admin certificates on eks
• map aws iam roles to kubernetes users and groups
• get cloudtrail audit trail for kubernetes api access
• bootstrap kubernetes cluster admin access during provisioning
• enforce mfa for kubernetes cluster access

When to choose

• your kubernetes cluster runs on aws and you already manage iam credentials
• you want centralized identity and audit logging via cloudtrail
• you are building a kubernetes installer on aws and want to avoid smuggling initial admin credentials

When to avoid

• your cluster is not on aws or you do not use aws iam
• you need authentication against other identity providers like oidc, ldap, or github
• you want a general-purpose kubernetes auth proxy rather than iam-specific token validation

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

auth security cli security cloud-computing developer-tools windows cloud go cli kubernetes aws-iam eks authentication kubectl cloudtrail daemonset containers linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="kubernetes-sigs/aws-iam-authenticator")