ServiceAccount and Bound Tokens
Articles 51–52 used ServiceAccount without dissecting it. This article gets into the mechanism: every namespace has a default SA, the kubelet auto-injects a short-lived token via a projected volume, and that token is bound to the exact pod and node. To prove it's truly bound, we grab the token in a running pod, call the API successfully, then delete the pod — the old token immediately becomes 401. Plus how to turn off auto-mount and read the JWT claims.
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KaiMay 24, 2026· 27 views