goodbye service account keys, hello workload identity federation — building secure apps with gcp

Goodbye Service Account Keys, Hello Workload Identity Federation

Tired of juggling a million service account keys for your cloud-based application? Want to up your security game without sacrificing the ease of development?

Service account keys can become a pain to manage when you have your application infrastructure spread across multiple cloud providers. They become a potential security risk for your application with additional management overhead for storage, rotation, and more.

This brings us to the world of workload identity federation on GCP, designed to solve that specific problem.

Today, I cover the following:

• What is workload identity federation (workload identity pools + IAM)?
• How to set it up on GCP.
• Live Example: How to use it with a GitHub actions workflow.

Workload identity federation is simply keyless authentication for service accounts. It solves the problems of storage of access keys, distribution, and rotation using short-lived dynamically provisioned tokens to authenticate your third-party applications to Google Cloud Platform.

Resources

• GCP docs: Workload Identity Federation
• GitHub OIDC: Configuring OpenID Connect
• Google GitHub auth action: google-github-actions/auth
• Code samples: udemy-kustomize-mastery