Our Journey Adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE at Scale

Introduction

In this article, we discuss our experience at Uber in adopting the SPIFFE/SPIRE open source projects to create a Zero Trust Security foundational platform. This platform provides workload identity for thousands of services in multi-cloud environments, across different workload scheduling platforms.

Challenges of Workload Identity

We start by highlighting the challenges we faced with workload identity before adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE. These challenges included managing identities for a large number of services and ensuring secure communication across diverse environments.

Introduction to SPIFFE/SPIRE

We provide an overview of SPIFFE (Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) and SPIRE (SPIFFE Runtime Environment) and explain how they address the challenges we faced. SPIFFE/SPIRE provide a secure and scalable approach to workload identity, allowing services to authenticate and securely communicate with each other.

Adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE

We discuss our journey of adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE at Uber. This involved integrating SPIFFE/SPIRE with our existing infrastructure and building a custom SPIRE agent. We also talk about the challenges we faced during the adoption process and how we overcame them.

Benefits and Impact

We describe the benefits and impact of adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE at scale. These include improved security, simplified identity management, and enhanced visibility and control over workloads.

Lessons learned

We share the lessons we learned throughout the process of adopting SPIFFE/SPIRE. These lessons include the importance of thorough testing, the need for good documentation and community support, and the value of building custom tools to fit specific needs.

Conclusion

We conclude by emphasizing the importance of workload identity in today's security landscape and the value of adopting open source solutions like SPIFFE/SPIRE. We highlight how SPIFFE/SPIRE allowed us to create a scalable and secure workload identity platform at Uber.