A Role in Kubernetes is an authorization construct that allows you to assign privileges to users or service accounts inside a single namespace. Roles can be used to define access rights, such as which resources a user can access and what actions they can perform on those resources. A Role provides higher granularity than a ClusterRole: it can only be used to grant access to resources within the same namespace as the Role.
ClusterRole, on the other hand, is a more powerful concept. It defines a set of permissions that can be granted across multiple namespaces, making it ideal for defining privileges for service accounts. ClusterRoles are also used to grant access to containerized applications running on nodes which are not part of the cluster. Additionally, ClusterRoles can also be used to grant access to resources outside of a given namespace, such as granting access to the API server itself or granting access to the node.
