Kubernetes RBAC can be used to give permissions to a subject in a particular Namespace. Can the same be accomplished with Cloud IAM?
If I got your point correctly that:
The IAM roles for a GKE kubernetes cluster are very simple, "Admin, Read/Write, Read". But you need more fine-grained control over the kubernetes cluster.
In this case:
There's a new "Alpha" feature in Google Cloud's IAM which wasn't available previously.
Under IAM > Roles
You can now create custom IAM roles with your own subset of permissions.
You can create a minimal role which allows for example gcloud container clusters get-credentials to work, but nothing else, allowing permissions within the kubernetes cluster to be fully managed by RBAC.
It will allow you to get more fine-grained access configurations for kubernetes cluster.
Not at the moment, no. IAM is used to assign and verify permissions when interacting with GCP APIs. IAM can only provide access to the GKE API, which does not take into account namespaces.
As you mentioned, RBAC is your option for more granular permissions within the cluster