Zero Trust Workload Identity with Spiffe and Spire: Automate mTLS authentication, eliminate secrets, and secure service mesh communication for Kuberne

By: Ashford, Corwin

Issue real workload identity for Kubernetes, enforce mutual TLS everywhere, and remove static secrets from your platform.

Teams ship fast on Kubernetes, yet identity sprawl, long lived secrets, and brittle TLS break production. Traditional certificates tied to hostnames do not fit pods, sidecars, gateways, and multicluster traffic.

This book gives you a complete, operator grade path to SPIFFE and SPIRE. You will issue short lived SVIDs, validate callers in meshes and proxies, and integrate external systems through OIDC discovery and JWT SVIDs, all with clear configs and runbooks that hold up under pressure.

map Kubernetes namespaces and service accounts to stable spiffe ids, design an identity scheme that simplifies policyrun spire server and agent correctly, use the workload api and sds without hostPath socketsattest nodes with psat, set rbac and audience controls, attest workloads with namespace service account label and image selectorsuse spiffe csi driver for per pod sockets, handle projected service account tokens after kubernetes 1 24manage entries with spire controller manager and clusterspiffeid crds, adopt a gitops workflow with review and drift detectionwire istio linkerd cilium and plain envoy for mtls with spiffe ids, apply exact and prefix san matching, set envoy rbac rulesfederate trust domains, publish and consume bundles, set cross domain san matchers, choose hub and spoke or peer topologiesoperate the oidc discovery provider, size jwks correctly, authenticate to aws sts vault and keycloak using jwt svidskeep keys in kms or hsm with keymanager, chain to aws private ca or ejbca with upstreamauthorityharden the datastore with postgresql and pgbouncer, run ha servers with leader election and safe agent failovertune performance for sds fanout, handshake cost, and session resumption, measure what matters with prometheus metrics and slosauthorize with envoy rbac and opa rego, map spiffe ids to database roles and broker clients for secretless data planesmeet compliance needs, map to nist 800 207 and cis kubernetes without busyworkuse field playbooks, fix loss of attestation, datastore issues, and jwks bloat quickly, spot anti patterns and their failure signaturesapply reference architectures for single cluster multicluster hybrid and edge, choose safe rotation windows and rollback plans

This is a code heavy guide with working YAML HCL Systemd Unit Shell and Python snippets that you can copy, adapt, and ship to real clusters.

Get the practical zero trust playbook for workloads, grab your copy today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FY5H3919
• ISBN13: 9798272038647
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.0" x 10.0"