All IAM glossary termsPrivileged Access · glossary
Workload identity
Also known as: Service identity · Machine identity
Definition
Workload identity is the practice of authenticating workloads (containers, functions, VMs) using identity derived from the runtime environment rather than static credentials.
In more depth
Implementations: AWS IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA), GCP Workload Identity, Azure Managed Identity, Kubernetes ServiceAccount tokens, SPIFFE/SPIRE.
Eliminates credential injection. Workload identity is the cloud-native replacement for the PAM credential-vault model for machine-to-machine auth.
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