A little over 10 years ago I wrote the design doc for SPIFFE, a standard for giving workloads cryptographic identities so services can authenticate to each other without passwords. I launched it at a talk at GlueCon that year. This was a unique thing as it was an “open source” project that was just a document. There was no code initially.
I almost started a company around it but did Heptio instead. I handed it off to Sunil James who started a company and got it into the CNCF. Sunil and the folks at his company, Scytale, also wrote the companion reference implementation called SPIRE.
This just goes to show I suck at timing. 😂 It is having a moment now. It only took 10 years for the need for workload identity to be obvious with the advent of agents.
To mark this I want to get some of the original artifacts out there for anyone that is interested.
- Original design doc (Google Docs)
- Original presentation at GlueCon
Easter egg: the colors in the original logo and design doc were based on my last name. Fun you can have when your name can be represented as hex. #00BEDA
and #BEDA00
. Those colors (or very similar) are still used in the logo!
Huge thank you to everyone who took the baton. Picking up someone else’s half-formed idea and shipping it is harder than having the idea. You all did that.
This was originally posted on LinkedIn but I want the long-term home to be on this blog.