Managing credentials and other types of access tokens is a hassle. In Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, you can take advantage of Service Principals and RBAC. But even then, a Service Principal requires a password. There is a better solution in Azure called Managed Identity. But how can you employ this feature when your workload runs in AKS? There is a solution, and I’ve explained all you need to know in an article on my employer’s developer blog.

There was this thing called Pod-Managed Identities, but that was pretty elaborate in its setup. Azure Workload Identity is much leaner, making the configuration and usage more straightforward. Managing credentials and connection strings in Kubernetes microservices is a hassle I have disliked from the start. Assigning a Managed Identity to an AKS pod or even a Service Principal and then relying on Azure RBAC can make your life as a developer or IT ops engineer so much more enjoyable.

Visit the blog linked earlier to read the full version. It’ll contain my usual bad jokes and is not censored in any way. I’d post the same article 1:1 on this blog if I had not researched the topic on company time.

I hope it can help you, and thank you for reading.