A frequent query that often arises, particularly within DevOps contexts, pertains to the permissions possessed by Kubernetes service accounts.
You might have a service account assigned to pods either by your own team or a platform team. It’s crucial to ascertain the level of access that a service account has, particularly concerning actions like deleting pods, listing namespaces, or removing deployments.
Here’s a straightforward method for conducting this assessment: make use of the “kubectl auth can-i” command.
For instance, if you wish to determine whether the “api-service-account” within the “devops-tools” namespace is capable of deleting deployments, you can open your terminal and enter the following command:
kubectl auth can-i delete deployments --as=system:serviceaccount:devops-tools:api-service-account
![](https://devopstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-06-at-0.16.36-1024x822.png)