GKE clusterrolebinding for cluster-admin fails with permission error

Question

I've just created a new cluster using Google Container Engine running Kubernetes 1.7.5, with the new RBAC permissions enabled. I've run into a problem allocating permissions for some of my services which lead me to the following:

The docs for using container engine with RBAC state that the user must be granted the ability to create authorization roles by running the following command:

kubectl create clusterrolebinding cluster-admin-binding --clusterrole=cluster-admin [--user=<user-name>]

However, this fails due to lack of permissions (which I would assume are the very same permissions which we are attempting to grant by running the above command).

Error from server (Forbidden): 
User "<user-name>" cannot create clusterrolebindings.rbac.authorization.k8s.io at the cluster scope.: 
  "Required \"container.clusterRoleBindings.create\" permission." 
  (post clusterrolebindings.rbac.authorization.k8s.io)

Any help would be much appreciated as this is blocking me from creating the permissions needed by my cluster services.

Answer 1

If your kubeconfig was created automatically by gcloud then your user is not the all powerful admin user - which you are trying to create a binding for.

Use gcloud container clusters describe <clustername> --zone <zone> on the cluster and look for the password field.

Thereafter execute kubectl --username=admin --password=FROMABOVE create clusterrolebinding ...