Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE – https://spiffe.io) was inspired by a few brilliant engineers due to their need to remove application-level authentication and network-level access control configuration. Joe Beda, one of the creators of Kubernetes, was the original author of the SPIFFE specification.
SPIFFE started as open source in 2016 for securely identifying software systems in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. It is mainly about establishing trust in a complex distributed environment where workloads are dynamically scaled and scheduled to run on any node in a cluster. The workloads using SPIFFE identify themselves with each other by looking at URIs such as spiffe://trust-domain/path, which are defined in a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) field in X.509 certificates.
SPIFFE's runtime environment is called the SPIFFE Runtime...