"SPIFFE/SPIRE Workload Identity: Zero-Trust Service Identity for Cloud-Native Systems"
Shared secrets and static certificates collapse under modern cloud volatility: containers churn, nodes are replaced, and trust boundaries blur across clusters and organizations. This book is written for experienced platform, security, and infrastructure engineers who need a rigorous, implementation-ready approach to non-human identity-one that holds up under adversarial threat models, operational failure modes, and real production constraints.
You'll learn SPIFFE as an interoperable identity contract-SPIFFE IDs, trust domains, SVIDs (X.509 and JWT), bundles, and the Workload API-and how to validate, rotate, and distribute trust safely at scale. The book then dives into SPIRE as the control plane: server/agent architecture, trust chains, key hierarchies, and the lifecycle that turns attested nodes into reliable identity issuers. From there it treats the hard parts head-on: node and workload attestation, selector quality, registration entry modeling, policy-as-code workflows, federation across trust domains, and correct service-mesh integration and authorization mapping.
Prerequisites include strong Kubernetes/Linux fundamentals, PKI/TLS literacy, and comfort operating distributed systems. Throughout, you'll get decision frameworks, trade-off criteria, and production playbooks for HA, scaling, incident response, observability, and version-aware operations-so the guidance remains durable as SPIRE evolves.