Identity, Access, and Trust Boundaries
What This Chapter Is About
Teach identity as the foundation for human access, workload access, least privilege, federation, privileged operations, and auditability.
Keep one durable idea in view:
Identity architecture makes every principal, permission, scope, credential, and review path explicit.
Sections
How the Chapter Develops
The chapter develops in this order:
Frame identity as the control plane for deciding who or what may act.
Separate human access from workload access and show how each should obtain credentials.
Turn permissions into scoped, least-privilege authorization decisions.
Finish by proving access is reviewable across production and non-production environments.
Together, these sections show that this capability is an architecture responsibility and decision space, not a catalog of provider features.
What You Will Be Able to Do
By the end of this chapter, the reader should be able to:
Distinguish human identities, workload identities, roles, policies, scopes, and credentials.
Explain when federation, temporary credentials, privileged access, and managed workload identity reduce risk.
Design and review least-privilege access across environments.
Describe the evidence needed to show who had access, why, and what they did.
Key Ideas
Authentication establishes identity; authorization decides permitted actions within a scope.
Human and workload identities have different lifecycles and should not share credentials.
Temporary credentials and platform-managed identities reduce reliance on long-lived secrets.
Least privilege is an iterative design and review process, not a one-time role choice.
Auditability requires access decisions, changes, and privileged actions to leave useful evidence.