How a portable cloud IAM strategy minimizes hyperscaler lock-in

When developers look at setting up Identity and Access Management (IAM) for their applications, unless there is a clear mandate for using a portable option, they usually opt for IAM services provided by their hyperscaler of choice. Minimal configuration efforts make these an easy initial choice; however, they also create significant lock-in challenges that can limit strategic flexibility and increase long-term costs.

The lock-in problem becomes evident when organizations try to diversify their cloud strategy or migrate workloads. Access policies written in AWS's proprietary policy language use resource patterns with AWS-specific ARN formats that cannot be directly translated to other providers. 

These policies often rely on platform-specific condition keys like aws:SourceVpc or aws:PrincipalOrgID that have no equivalents in Azure or Google Cloud. Similarly, resource-based policies attached to services like S3 or SQS use AWS-specific principal identifiers that would require complete rewrites for other platforms.

For organizations looking to architect in an open and portable manner, implementing a platform-agnostic IAM strategy becomes essential for maintaining strategic flexibility and avoiding costly vendor dependencies.

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Building a Portable IAM Architecture

Modern open-source technologies make it feasible to implement enterprise-grade IAM capabilities that work consistently across IaaS environments. This means choosing tools that use standardized protocols and formats rather than proprietary alternatives. 

• For user identity management, solutions like Keycloak provide comprehensive identity provider capabilities with social login support, multi-factor authentication, and user federation using standard OAuth2 and OpenID Connect protocols. These systems generate JWT tokens with standardized claims that aren't tied to specific cloud providers, making them portable across environments.
• Non-human or workload identities benefit from specialized identity solutions like SPIFFE/SPIRE, which provides workload identity across distributed systems, or HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes authentication for dynamic secret management. These tools work consistently whether your containers run on AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE.
• Policy definition and enforcement can be standardized using tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA), which provides flexible, declarative policy definitions that work across diverse resources and platforms. Unlike cloud-specific policy languages, OPA uses standardized expressions that can be adapted to any resource naming scheme or cloud environment.

Organizations implementing portable IAM strategies have a unique opportunity to take advantage of alternative infrastructure providers that prioritize openness and interoperability. NetActuate's Open Network Edge, which is built entirely on open-source tooling, naturally integrates with portable IAM architectures to help you define portable application and business logic.

Learn more about building a portable IAM  architecture, along with all the other common infrastructure and service setups used by cloud-native organizations in our eBook: Architecting for Openness: A Guide for Avoiding Hyerscaler Lock-in. 

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