Gitlab CI uses the auto generated service account when applying k8s changes over our pre defined service account

Hello gitlab!

We are using an RBAC-enabled cluster and Gitlab managed cluster for our k8s setup:

We have gone through and correctly setup our own gitlab-admin service account per these instructions https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/clusters/. After the service account was created, we've gone ahead and pasted the service token into our k8s setup like so:

During our CI/CD process, we have a deploy step to facilitate auto deploys to our cluster. A few lines of code we use to properly set up the deploy:

kubectl config set-cluster k8s --server="${KUBE_URL}" --certificate-authority="${KUBE_CA_PEM_FILE}"
kubectl config set-credentials gitlab-admin --token="${KUBE_TOKEN}"
kubectl config set-context our-context --cluster=k8s --user=gitlab-admin --namespace=our-namespace
kubectl config use-context our-context

This creates the correct context for us, and we can confirm the current-context is configured properly. What we've noticed though is that gitlab does not use this context when applying our k8s changes. Gitlab is using the auto generated service account that was created upon cluster creation, namespace-service-account. How can we change this to use a different service account instead of the default generated one?

TLDR;

Problem: Gitlab uses the auto generated service account when applying k8s changes even when we've configured it not to

Solution: Use our own service account when applying k8s changes, i.e., the `gitlab-admin` service account

Any guidance would be very much appreciated! As of now, the auto generated namespace-service-account got into a weird state and no longer has the proper permissions to deploy to our k8s cluster. We're hoping to fix this as soon as possible. Thanks in advance!

Relevant issues:

Edited Aug 16, 2019 by Michael K