2 posts tagged with "iam"

When you build a production Kubernetes platform from scratch, you accumulate non-human identities faster than you expect. By the time the minicloud platform reached operational maturity — a 5-node bare-metal k3s cluster running 70+ workloads — it had more than 35 distinct non-human identities spanning six different categories. Most of them are invisible during normal operations. You only notice them when one breaks.

This post maps every non-human identity type in use on the platform, explains how they differ, and documents the operational lessons learned from the ones that caused incidents.

Most enterprise identity architectures did not start as what they are today. They started in 1999 with Active Directory, accumulated LDAP integrations over the following decade, and are now partway through a migration toward cloud-based identity via Microsoft Entra ID — carrying the weight of every layer that came before.

We built our platform from scratch. We never had an on-premises domain. We never configured LDAP. We skipped directly to the protocol stack that enterprises are spending years and significant money trying to reach. This post explains what we chose, why, and how the resulting identity architecture compares to the enterprise standard.