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

Authentication implications in a service mesh

Unlike the typical way of designing an OAuth flow, which needs to be designed according to the specific needs of the service or application, the service mesh has the advantage of having out-of-the-box capabilities to oversee authentication.

According to our experience, the killer use case to take advantage of the service mesh for authentication is service-to-service authentication, which, as outlined in the previous chapter, is typically achieved in OAuth by using the client credential flow. This is not how the service mesh typically handles authentication across services. If both services reside in the service mesh, authentication is usually performed by taking advantage of mTLS. The downside to using a certificate as a means to mutually authenticate services is the management of these certificates, which are supposed to expire eventually. A service mesh usually has the capability to automatically manage certificates, which eliminates...