Set up RBAC for Console

The Conduktor RBAC (Role Based Access Control) system enables you to restrict access to resources and enforce permissions at User and Group granularity. This is a critical step in ensuring that you have control over your Apache Kafka data.

With Conduktor RBAC, you can:

• configure access to Conduktor services
• configure global permissions across multiple clusters
• administer permissions for Kafka resources (topics, consumer groups, clusters, subjects, connectors)

Assign permissions

You can assign two types of permissions:

• services: view/manage Console services
• resources: interact with Kafka resources

And you can assign those permissions to users or groups.

To assign user/group permissions, open Console and go to Settings > Users or Groups, as required. Click ... next to the user/group you want to modify. Here's an example for a user:

User permissions are additive

If a user belongs to multiple groups, they will inherit all the permissions assigned to these groups. If they have restricted access to a topic but belong to a group that has full access, they will have full access to the topic.

Manage services permissions

You can restrict access to Conduktor Console services such as settings or left menu items (like certificates). For example, you may want to limit the number of users who can generate API keys. By default, you all users can:

• access data masking policies
• view Self-service

Manage resources permissions

The RBAC model is very granular and allows you to customize the permissions to Kafka resources based on your requirements:

Resource	Permissions
Topics	View config
Topics	Consume
Topics	Produce
Topics	Create
Topics	Delete
Topics	Empty
Topics	Add partitions
Consumer groups	Viewer
Consumer groups	Reset
Consumer groups	Create
Consumer groups	Delete
Subjects	View
Subjects	Edit compatibility
Subjects	Create / Update
Subjects	Delete
Kafka connectors	View task and status
Kafka connectors	View config
Kafka connectors	Edit config
Kafka connectors	Deploy
Kafka connectors	Delete
Kafka connectors	Restart
Kafka connectors	Pause / Resume
Clusters	View ACL
Clusters	Manage ACL
Clusters	View broker
Clusters	Edit broker
Clusters	Edit SR compatibility

All these permissions can be applied on one specific cluster, or all your clusters.

Prefixes

When you define a permission, you might want it to be applied to:

• a specific topic, by typing my-topic for instance
• all the topics, by using a wildcard *
• a subset that starts with a certain prefix, by typing my-prefix-*

Here's an example of those three cases in Console:

Quick select

To save time during the permissions creation, you can use the Quick select to give a default set of permissions or set this up using the CLI, API or Terraform.

User permissions example

Here's an example of a set of permissions given to Alice:

We can see that this is a recap of all the permissions this user has. In grey, we have the permissions Alice inherits from the group Project A, from the application support-for-tracker and in white the ones that are assigned to her directly.

This set of permissions gives her:

• Full access to the topic alice-private-topic on the cluster test
• Full access on all topics, that start with the prefix app-a-, across all clusters and that she inherits this from the group Project A
• Partial access to the topic tracker-click-1 and tracker-click-2 on the cluster Cluster-A and that she inherits this from the application support-for-tracker