Release Environments - GET - Analyze the authentication mechanism to give K8S access to engineers

Context

Release environments (REs) are long-lived environments to be continuously deployed to from stable branches. These environments provide confidence in the stability and reliability of the stable branches for cutting releases.

At the moment, GitLab engineers don't have access to the K8S cluster where REs are running. We need to discover a method to give access to all GitLab engineers. Note that, Release environments are cloud-native setups, with each environment runs inside a K8S namespace.

Requirements

Some requirements in this situation:

• Automated: REs are short-lived (3 months) and created automatically. Thus, their user authentication setup should also be automated
• Generic access to all: we should not set up access for each engineer case-by-case, since it is very manual and inefficient.

Exit Criteria

• Decide a solution to give K8S access
• Write down a plan to give access
• Create followup issues