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Identity and Access

Purpose

This page explains how identities, roles, policies, and trust relationships control access in cloud environments and why identity design is one of the most important architecture decisions.

Core Concepts

Identity answers two different questions. Authentication asks who or what is making a request. Authorization asks what that identity is allowed to do. Cloud systems need both.

There are also different identity types.

  • Human identities are for administrators, developers, operators, and analysts.
  • Workload identities are for applications, services, functions, jobs, or containers.
  • External identities may come from partners, customers, or federated enterprise directories.

Good cloud design keeps these separate. Humans should not share long-lived admin credentials with workloads, and workloads should not carry broad permissions just because it is convenient during early development.

What Good Access Design Looks Like

  • Grant permissions to groups or roles where possible instead of managing users one by one.
  • Prefer short-lived credentials or managed identity paths over static keys.
  • Scope permissions to the smallest useful boundary.
  • Separate deployment permissions from runtime permissions.
  • Make privileged access reviewable and auditable.

Identity design also shapes incident response. If permissions are too broad or unclear, a compromise spreads faster and investigation becomes harder.

Common Mistakes

  • Using shared accounts or embedding keys directly in code or configuration.
  • Giving workloads broad administrative permissions they do not need.
  • Treating identity as separate from networking, pipelines, and data access.
  • Forgetting to review who can assume roles, impersonate service accounts, or manage secrets.
  • Building manually around exceptions instead of designing a clean access model early.

How This Fits Into Cloud Engineering

Identity and access management sits underneath every other cloud concern. Network boundaries, data protection, CI/CD, and application runtimes all depend on a trustworthy permission model. A cloud engineer who understands identity well can reduce blast radius, simplify audits, and make systems safer to operate.

Official References