Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

By : Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli
5 (1)
Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

5 (1)
By: Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli

Overview of this book

Identity is paramount for every architecture design, making it crucial for enterprise and solutions architects to understand the benefits and pitfalls of implementing identity patterns. However, information on cloud identity patterns is generally scattered across different sources and rarely approached from an architect’s perspective, and this is what Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies aims to solve, empowering solutions architects to take an active part in implementing identity solutions. Throughout this book, you’ll cover various theoretical topics along with practical examples that follow the implementation of a standard de facto identity provider (IdP) in an enterprise, such as Azure Active Directory. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll explore the different factors that contribute to an enterprise's current status quo around identities and harness modern authentication approaches to meet specific requirements of an enterprise. You’ll also be able to make sense of how modern application designs are impacted by the company’s choices and move on to recognize how a healthy organization tackles identity and critical tasks that the development teams pivot on. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to breeze through creating portable, robust, and reliable applications that can interact with each other.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Impact of Digital Transformation
4
Part 2: OAuth Implementation and Patterns
8
Part 3: Real-World Scenarios

AAD basics

AAD is a globally distributed identity and access management service organized so that each customer that would like to start using it can create their own separate and isolated instance, which is also referred to as a tenant. Each AAD tenant has a unique GUID and a unique tenant name that is written in the following format: tenantname.onmicrosoft.com. The tenant name is also called the default domain of the tenant.

Before diving into the description of the AAD objects, it is worth refreshing the concept of a security principal. It’s common to encounter the concept of security principals when talking about identity. In simple terms, a security principal can be defined as any entity that can be authenticated, that can be assigned permissions to do something, and that can be the target of a permission. Typical examples of security principals are users and groups.

AAD provides the ability to create and orchestrate the interactions of different types of objects...