SPIRE, the community-supported implementation of SPIFFE, enables users to take advantage of workload identity primitives like X.509s and JWTs without needing a deep understanding of complex topics like trust bootstrap, secure introduction, and credential provisioning/rotation.
But implementing the SPIFFE standard is not without its difficulties. SPIRE must scale to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of workloads in today's hybrid cloud architectures. And, despite a requirement for high, efficient throughout, the system must remain resilient in the face of failure.
In this deep dive, we will study the challenges encountered during the implementation of SPIRE, design considerations and philosophy, and production use cases.