What is Service Account?
A Kubernetes identity for processes running in pods to authenticate to the API server.
A ServiceAccount provides an identity for processes running in pods. Each pod is associated with a service account (default if not specified). Service accounts can be granted RBAC permissions to interact with the Kubernetes API. In EKS, service accounts are annotated with an IAM role ARN for IRSA — giving pods AWS permissions. Avoid using the default service account with broad permissions. Always create dedicated service accounts with minimal necessary permissions.
Related Terms
More Kubernetes Terms
Admission Controller
A Kubernetes plugin that intercepts API requests before objects are persisted.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adjusting the number of compute resources based on demand.
ClusterIP
The default Kubernetes Service type that exposes a service on an internal cluster IP.
ConfigMap
A Kubernetes object for storing non-sensitive configuration data as key-value pairs.
Controller Manager
Kubernetes control plane component running control loops to maintain desired state.
CoreDNS
The default DNS server in Kubernetes clusters for service discovery.
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