I might even go further - kiam is not a standard deployment supported by the kubernetes project like the api server or the scheduler or the autoscaler. See https://github.com/uswitch/kiam

That said it is a very common deployment strategy in ec2 to run kiam or kube2iam. I wish the kube core teams took over the development of an aws iam role service since issues like bad defaults would be solved much quicker. Your only other alternative is to use iam access keys and nobody likes that (security wise and it’s a pain to configure).