Enterprise-managed IAM: An SRE team case study

Enterprise-managed identity and access management (IAM) permits cloud directors to centrally configure entry and safety settings for your entire group. To study in regards to the fundamentals, see “How enterprise-managed IAM works.”

The case examine on this weblog publish exhibits the best way to simply and securely implement and handle a site reliability engineering (SRE) group’s entry throughout an enterprise.

Case examine

A big banking shopper has a centralized website reliability engineering (SRE) group that manages operations for all sources within the group. The shopper makes use of federation to authenticate customers to IBM Cloud enterprise accounts. All groups use Kubernetes and IBM Cloud Databases sources as a part of their deployment. The SRE group wants operational entry to those sources for each group in each account beneath the corporate’s IBM Cloud enterprise.

Because the groups introduce new sources, the SRE group manages these sources, as nicely. Manually managing this entry setup throughout a rising variety of accounts is error-prone, time-consuming and doesn’t meet sure audit controls because the assigned entry may be up to date by the kid account directors.

By utilizing enterprise-managed IAM templates to outline entry for his or her SRE group and assign them to the group’s accounts, the shopper’s course of modified from an ongoing effort to a one-time setup exercise. Now, SRE entry is included in each established and newly created accounts. Moreover, this entry can’t be up to date by the kid account administrator.

On this publish, we’ll present step-by-step directions on the best way to apply this resolution in your group.

Stipulations

1. Be within the root enterprise account.
2. Ensure that the enterprise person performing this job has Template Administrator and Template Project Administrator roles on IAM providers and a minimum of the Viewer position on the Enterprise service. For extra data, see “Assigning access for enterprise management.”
3. Ensure that youngster accounts allow the enterprise-managed IAM setting. For extra data, see “Opting in to enterprise-managed IAM for new and existing accounts.”

Answer

First, create a trusted profile template for the SRE group members and add entry coverage templates to handle all IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters and IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB cases within the youngster accounts. Subsequent, assign the trusted profile template to the account group containing the account(s) to handle. Lastly, we’ll grant further entry coverage templates to the SRE group by creating a brand new trusted profile template model with the extra entry required and updating the prevailing task accounts.

To implement this resolution, we’ll full the next steps:

1. Create a trusted profile template.
2. Add a belief relationship.
3. Add entry coverage templates.
4. Evaluate and commit the trusted profile template.
5. Assign the trusted profile template.

Then, we’ll replace the task with these steps:

1. Create a brand new template model.
2. Add a further entry coverage template.
3. Evaluate and commit the trusted profile template.
4. Replace the prevailing task to model 2.

Steps to create and assign a template

1. Go to Handle > Entry (IAM). Within the Enterprise part, click on Templates > Trusted Profiles > Create. Click on Create to create a trusted profile template for the SRE group:

2. Add a belief relationship to dynamically add the SRE group to the trusted profile based mostly in your Identification supplier (IdP):

This shall be based mostly on the claims accessible by your IdP:

3. Go to the Entry tab to create entry insurance policies:

Administrator position for the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service:

Administrator position for IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB:

4. Evaluate and commit the trusted profile and insurance policies templates. Committing templates prevents them from being modified:

5. Assign the trusted profile template to the account group. By choosing your entire account group, the system will routinely assign templates to the brand new accounts when they’re added or moved in:

After the task is full, the members of the SRE group can log in to the accounts beneath the account group and have the required entry to carry out their duties.

As your groups and cloud workloads develop, you would possibly have to allow the SRE group to handle different sources. Within the following instance, we’re granting the SRE group entry to handle IBM Cloudant along with their present entry.

Steps to replace a template and task

1. First, since we have to replace an assigned template, we have to create a brand new model of the SRE group template:

2. Since we wish to develop the SRE group entry, we’ll create a brand new coverage template with entry to Cloudant sources:

3. Commit the trusted profile template and coverage template:

4. Now, we have to replace the task from model 1 to model 2. First, swap to template model 1:

Within the Assignments tab, replace the task:

As soon as the task is full, the SRE group will now have the ability to handle IBM Cloudant sources along with the prevailing IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB entry.

Conclusion

Enterprise-managed identification and entry administration (IAM) is a strong resolution that simplifies and centralizes entry and safety configuration. On this article, we explored how this strategy generally is a game-changer for managing entry to sources throughout a rising variety of accounts.

The challenges confronted by the banking shopper in managing entry for his or her SRE group throughout a number of accounts had been complicated and time-consuming. Nevertheless, by leveraging enterprise-managed IAM templates, they remodeled an ongoing effort right into a one-time setup exercise. This streamlined entry provisioning and enhanced safety by making certain that entry management remained constant and enforced throughout accounts.

Different interface samples

Included beneath are the equal steps wanted to finish this use case utilizing the command line interface and Terraform:

Able to simplify entry administration? Be taught extra about enterprise-managed IAM