Rotate your cluster credentials

Autopilot Standard

This page explains how to rotate your GKE cluster credentials. Planning for and regularly rotating your cluster credentials is crucial for keeping your clusters in a healthy state. On this page, you learn how to perform credential rotations. You also learn about best practices for planning regular rotations.

This page is for Security specialists who are responsible for the lifecycle of credentials on GKE clusters. To learn more about common roles and example tasks that we reference in Google Cloud content, see Common GKE Enterprise user roles and tasks.

About credential rotations in GKE

The cluster root Certificate Authority (CA) has a limited lifetime. When the CA expires, any credentials that were signed by the CA are no longer valid, including the cluster client certificate (from the MasterAuth API field), the key and certificate for the API server, and the kubelet client certificates. Your cluster credential lifetime depends on when you created the cluster or when you last rotated your credentials. For details, check the credential lifetime.

You can perform a credential rotation to revoke and issue new credentials for your cluster. This operation rotates the cluster CA private key and requires re-creation of nodes to use new credentials. You must start and finish a credential rotation for your cluster before your current credentials expire. In addition to rotating credentials, credential rotation also performs an IP rotation.

When to perform a credential rotation

You should perform credential rotations regularly and in advance of your current credential expiry date. Credential rotations require node re-creation to use the new credentials, which might be disruptive to running workloads. Plan maintenance periods and perform the rotations during maintenance windows to avoid unexpected workload downtime or unresponsive API clients outside the cluster.

To learn more about how maintenance availability affects cluster credential rotation, and what type of disruption your cluster experiences during the steps of a rotation, see the row for credential rotation in the table of manual changes that recreate the nodes using a node upgrade strategy and respecting maintenance policies. GKE depends on resource availability for updating the nodes. To learn more about node updates, see Planning for node update disruptions.

Cluster credential lifetime

Cluster credential lifetime typically depends on when the cluster was created or when credentials were most recently rotated:

Clusters created prior to approximately October 2021 have a 5 year CA lifetime.
Clusters created after approximately October 2021 have a 30 year CA lifetime.
Clusters rotated after approximately January 2022 have a 30 year CA lifetime.

Find clusters with expiring or expired credentials

If your cluster's credentials will expire in the next 180 days, or your cluster's credentials have already expired, GKE delivers guidance with an insight and recommendation to explain that you must perform a credential rotation for this cluster. This guidance includes the date of the expiration of the credentials. You can view this guidance in the Google Cloud console. Or, you can view this guidance with the gcloud CLI, or the Recommender API, specifying the CLUSTER_CA_EXPIRATION subtype.

If you receive an insight and recommendation for a cluster, you must perform a credential rotation, or GKE automatically starts a credential rotation within 30 days of the current CA expiry date, as explained in the next section. Once the credential rotation has completed it can take up to 36 hours for the insight and recommendation to resolve.

GKE automation policy to prevent cluster outages

To prevent your cluster from entering an unrecoverable state if your current credentials expire, GKE automatically starts a credential rotation within 30 days of your current CA expiry date. For example, if your cluster CA expires on January 6, 2024 and you don't rotate your credentials by December 5, 2023, GKE starts an automatic rotation on or after December 7, 2023, and completes this rotation seven days after the operation starts. This automatic rotation is a last-resort attempt to prevent a cluster outage, and has the following considerations:

Automatic rotations generally respect maintenance windows or maintenance exclusions, however GKE reserves the right to perform steps within 30 days of expiration to rotate the credentials, regardless of maintenance availability.
If maintenance availability prevents GKE from completing the rotation initially, GKE continues to attempt to complete the rotation until the date that the credentials expire, after which the cluster becomes unrecoverable.
When the credential rotation completes, the expiring credentials are revoked. Kubernetes API clients outside the cluster, like kubectl in local environments, won't work until you configure the clients to use the new credentials.
Node pool re-creations during the rotation might cause disruptions to running workloads.

Before you begin

Before you start, make sure you have performed the following tasks:

Enable the Google Kubernetes Engine API.

Enable Google Kubernetes Engine API

If you want to use the Google Cloud CLI for this task, install and then initialize the gcloud CLI. If you previously installed the gcloud CLI, get the latest version by running gcloud components update.
Note: For existing gcloud CLI installations, make sure to set the compute/region and compute/zone properties. By setting default locations, you can avoid errors in gcloud CLI like the following: One of [--zone, --region] must be supplied: Please specify location.

Check credential lifetime

We recommend that you check your credential lifetime before and after you perform a credential rotation so that you know the validity of your cluster root CA.

To check the credential lifetime for a single cluster, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters describe CLUSTER_NAME \
    --region REGION_NAME \
    --format "value(masterAuth.clusterCaCertificate)" \
    | base64 --decode \
    | openssl x509 -noout -dates

The output is similar to the following:

notBefore=Mar 17 16:45:34 2023 GMT
notAfter=Mar  9 17:45:34 2053 GMT

If you run this command after starting a credential rotation, the output is the lifetime of your original certificate. This certificate remains valid until you complete the rotation. After you complete the rotation, the output is the lifetime of your new certificate.

To check the credential lifetime for all clusters in a project, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters list --project PROJECT_ID \
    | awk 'NR>1 {print "echo; echo Validity for cluster " $1 " in location " $2 ":;\
         gcloud container clusters describe --project PROJECT_ID " $1 " --location " $2 " \
         --format \"value(masterAuth.clusterCaCertificate)\" \
         | base64 --decode | openssl x509 -noout -dates"}' \
    | bash

Perform a credential rotation

Any credential rotation involves the following steps:

Start the rotation: the control plane starts serving on a new IP address in addition to the original IP address. New credentials are issued to workloads and the control plane.
Recreate nodes: GKE recreates cluster nodes so that the nodes use the new IP address and credentials, respecting availability from maintenance windows and exclusions. You can also manually recreate your nodes by performing a node version upgrade to the same GKE version that the nodes already run.
Update API clients: after starting the rotation, update any cluster API clients, such as development machines using kubectl, to communicate with the control plane using the new IP address.
Complete the rotation: the control plane stops serving traffic over the original IP address. Old credentials are revoked, including any existing static credentials for Kubernetes ServiceAccounts.

When you start a credential rotation, or when GKE automatically starts a rotation, GKE performs these steps automatically, including attempting to complete the rotation. At each step, GKE respects maintenance availability, although during automatic rotations before cluster expiration, GKE reserves the right to ignore maintenance availability to prevent your cluster from becoming unrecoverable.

If you don't complete a credential rotation within seven days of starting it, GKE attempts to complete the rotation for you. If any nodes in your cluster still use the previous credentials, the automatic completion operation fails, but GKE continues to attempt completion until the credentials expire and the cluster becomes unrecoverable. You should plan to manually track and complete any credential rotations that you start. To override maintenance availability blockers, run the commands in each of the sections that follow to manually trigger those phases of the rotation process. Don't rely on automatic completion, which is a best-effort measure.

Start the rotation

To start a credential rotation, run the following command:

gcloud container clusters update CLUSTER_NAME \
    --region REGION_NAME \
    --start-credential-rotation

This command creates new credentials, issues these credentials to the control plane, and configures the control plane to serve on two IP addresses: the original IP address and a new IP address.

Recreate nodes

After reconfiguring the API server to serve on a new IP address, GKE automatically updates your nodes to use the new IP address and credentials if there is maintenance availability. GKE upgrades all of your nodes to the same GKE version that the nodes already run, which recreates the nodes. For more information, refer to Node pool upgrades.

By default, GKE automatically completes credential rotations seven days after you start the operation. If an active maintenance window or exclusion in your cluster prevents GKE from recreating some nodes during this seven day period, the credential rotation initially fails to complete. However, GKE continues to try to recreate the nodes and complete the rotation until maintenance availability lets GKE proceed. During major events like Google Cloud Next, GKE might also pause automatic node recreations so that you don't experience disruptions.

If you use maintenance exclusions or maintenance windows that could result in a failed rotation, manually upgrade your cluster to force node recreation:
```
gcloud container clusters upgrade CLUSTER_NAME \
    --location=LOCATION \
    --cluster-version=VERSION
```
Replace VERSION with the same GKE version that the cluster already uses.

For more information, see manual changes that respect GKE maintenance policies.

Check the progress of node pool recreation

To monitor the rotation operation, run the following command:

gcloud container operations list \
    --filter="operationType=UPGRADE_NODES AND status=RUNNING" \
    --format="value(name)"

This command returns the operation ID of the node upgrade operation.

To poll the operation, pass the operation ID to the following command:
```
gcloud container operations wait OPERATION_ID
```

Node pools are recreated one-by-one, and each has its own operation. If you have multiple node pools, use these instructions to poll each operation.

Update API clients

After starting the credential rotation, you must update all API clients outside the cluster (such as kubectl on developer machines) to use the new credentials and point to the new IP address of the control plane.

To update your API clients, run the following command for each client:

gcloud container clusters get-credentials CLUSTER_NAME \
    --region REGION_NAME

Update Kubernetes ServiceAccount credentials

If you use static credentials for ServiceAccounts in your cluster, switch to short-lived credentials. Completing the rotation invalidates existing ServiceAccount credentials. If you don't want to use short-lived credentials, ensure that you recreate your static credentials for all ServiceAccounts in the cluster after you complete the rotation.

Update hardcoded IP addresses and firewall rules

If you hardcoded the IP address of the control plane in your environment, or if you have firewall rules that target the IP address of the control plane, update the addresses to the new IP address. If you complete the rotation without updating IP addresses in applications and in firewall rules, those resources might experience disruptions when GKE stops serving on the previous control plane IP address.

Complete the rotation

After updating API clients outside the cluster, complete the rotation to configure the control plane to serve only with the new credentials and the new IP address:

gcloud container clusters update CLUSTER_NAME \
    --region=REGION_NAME \
    --complete-credential-rotation

If the credential rotation fails to complete and returns an error message similar to the following, refer to Error 400: Node pool requires recreation:

ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.update) ResponseError: code=400, message=Node pool "test-pool-1" requires recreation.

GKE respects maintenance availability when automatically completing the rotation, however GKE might ignore this availability within 30 days of expiration to prevent the cluster from becoming unrecoverable. If rotation completion initially fails, and the rotation started at least seven days ago, GKE attempts to complete the rotation until the date that the credentials expire, after which the cluster becomes unrecoverable.