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Teams

Access to NAIS is handled by nais teams (not to be confused by the video meeting tool Microsoft Teams). This is a self service portal to create and manage teams and team members and creates corresponding resources in Kubernetes, GitHub and Google Cloud.

graph LR
subgraph NAIS
  subgraph Kubernetes
    subgraph team-a-ns[Team A\nNamespace]
    end

    subgraph team-b-ns[Team B\nNamespace]
    end

    subgraph team-c-ns[Team C\nNamepsace]
    end
  end

  subgraph GCP[Google Cloud]
    subgraph team-a-project[Team A\n<small>Project</small>]
    end

    subgraph team-b-project[Team B\n<small>Project<\small>]
    end

    subgraph team-c-project[Team C\n<small>Project<\small>]
    end
  end
end

team-a-ns --> team-a-project
team-b-ns --> team-b-project
team-c-ns --> team-c-project

To access NAIS teams, you must be using a naisdevice and logging on with your @nav.no user account.

Nais teams will create the following resources for each team:

  • Namespaces in all Kubernetes cluster environments
  • Google Cloud projects (one project per team/environment combination)
  • Azure AD group (eg. my-team-name@nav.no)
  • GitHub team (eg. @my-team-name)

Creating a new team

To create a new team, open NAIS teams in your browser, log in, and follow the instructions. The following resources will be generated for the new team:

  • An Azure AD security group (no Office365 integration, nor e-mail address).
  • A GitHub team is created.
  • Deploy keys are created, and can be obtained in the teams settings part of console.
  • GCP users are provisioned, and users can log in to the Google Cloud Console using their NAV e-mail address.
  • Two GCP projects are provisioned, one for development and one for production. See https://console.cloud.google.com/home/dashboard?project=<(dev|prod)-yourteamname>.
  • Namespaces are provisioned in all Kubernetes clusters.

Adding a team member

Team membership is managed in NAIS teams. To add a new team member, open NAIS teams in your browser, log in, find the team you want to add a member to, scroll down to the members list and click the "Edit" button.

A new button 'Add member' will appear, click it to add a new member.

Warning

It is the responsibility of each team to keep the group member roster up to date. This includes removing former team members in a timely fashion.

Deleting a team

Danger

Deleting a team is a destructive operation. All resources associated with the team will be deleted, including all data in databases and storage buckets and requires a second owner to confirm the deletion.

To delete a team, open NAIS teams in your browser, log in, find the team you want to delete, and click the "Delete" button. You will then be shown a list of resources that will be deleted, and asked to request the deletion of the team.

The team is not deleted yet, a second owner of the team log in to NAIS teams and confirm the deletion of the team using a special link that is shown after the deletion request is made.

Once the second owner has confirmed the deletion all resources associated with the team, as outlined in the Creating a new team section, will be permanently deleted.

Access to API keys

In order to access team API keys, go to console, then go to settings under the specific team.

Rotate API key

If you need to rotate the api keys then you can go to console and click on the "Rotate key" button, a pop-up will ask you to confirm the rotation.

Team namespaces

Team namespaces are supported in both on-prem and in GCP. Refer to the team namespaces documentation for details.

GCP Team projects

Each team has their own Google Cloud Platform project, which consist of:

  • a set of users,
  • a set of APIs,
  • in addition to authentication and monitoring settings of those APIs.

These projects are managed through Google Cloud Console.

So, for example, all of your Cloud Storage buckets and objects, along with user permissions for accessing them, reside in a project.

In general every member of the team has the possibility to add the necessary permissions they need via IAM role managment. There is no general limitation as to which features/products that can be used in a project, but everyone needs to conduct platform risk assessment (ROS). While we encourage the teams to base their ROS(s) and data protection impact assessments (DPIA / PVK) on the ones done by the NAIS team, each team is responsible to do their own necessary ROS and PVK aimed for their usage/feature not covered by existing ROS.

Remember to clean up after yourself, so that NAV doesn't unnecessarily pay for resources. Each team has a dashboard where they can visualise and monitor their product performance. View team dashboards. We also have a dashboard showing all our GCP projects.

Nais recommends that teams use Terraform, or similar technologies, to control the lifecycle of resources created in team-projects. This is more important in production, for services that will run for a longer period of time, than ad-hoc experimentation in dev.

Access management

To promote autonomous teams, teams control access to their own projects completely by themselves. This can be done either by pipeline, or manually adding access when needed.

There are different scenarios for when and how to give access to users, and the official Google Cloud Docs is definitively the best source for information.

Google Docs has a list of possible predefined roles that we recommend using. These roles can also be listed our with gcloud iam roles list --filter $resource.

Running the command without the --filter argument will return a very long list.

Temporary access

On a general basis, access should not be permanent. A good habit is to only grant your self or other a temporary access.

Using the following gcloud-cli command will grant a user 1 hours of access to roles/cloudsql.instanceUser: 

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding <PROJECT_ID> --member=user:<FIRSTNAME>.<LASTNAME>@nav.no --role=roles/cloudsql.instanceUser --condition="expression=request.time < timestamp('$(date -v '+1H' -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')'),title=temp_access"

There is more information over at Google Cloud Docs.

Examples

Access to Postgres

We have a separate guide for how to give your self temporary access to a Postgres database. Head on over to persistence/postgres.

Underneath we have outlined two typical use cases for when you need to give your self or someone else access. Do get a better understanding of how to give and revoke access with gcloud, you should read Granting, changing, and revoking access to resources .

How to give your self access

To be able to run this commando, you first need to find your PROJECT_ID, and the specific ROLE_NAME you want access to. To adhere to the principle of using temporary access, the example below will give access to ROLE_NAME for 1 hour. 

gcloud projects add-iam-policy-binding <PROJECT_ID> --member=user:<FIRSTNAME>.<LASTNAME>@nav.no --role=<ROLE_NAME> --condition="expression=request.time < timestamp('$(date -v '+1H' -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')'),title=temp_access"

As an example, if you'd want to view your team's Storage buckets, you'll need the roles/storage.objectViewer role. It's always smart to only give out temporary access.

This can also be leveraged to give a user belonging to a different team access to your team's resources.

How to give a service account access

A service account is also a --member of a project, but instead of running the command mentioned in How to give your self access, you change --member=user:<email> to --member=serviceAccount:<email>.

GCP IAM recommender

Sometimes you might end up giving more (a wider) access than strictly necessary - but fear not! GCP has an IAM recommender which will monitor each access permission given, and compare it to accesses actually asked for (or required). After which the IAM recommender will recommend a more granular access, that probably fits you and your usage better! Read more about the IAM recommender over at Google Cloud Docs.

Last update: 2023-10-02
Created: 2019-09-16