Cloud & Infrastructure Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published May 5, 2026 4 min read

Workload Identity: The Pattern That Removes Long-Lived Credentials

Workload identity lets services assume IAM roles without static credentials. The pattern, the providers, and the migration.

AWS: IRSA

IAM Roles for Service Accounts. K8s service accounts assume IAM roles.

Tokens scoped per pod; rotated automatically.

Similar mechanism for GCP.

K8s service accounts map to GCP service accounts.

Inventory existing static credentials.

Replace one at a time; verify; remove the static credential.

Months-long project for large fleets; worth it for the security gain.