SSO to CockroachDB clusters using JWT

The blog post by Abhinav Garg and Kyle Patron discusses the implementation of JWT (Json Web Token) for SQL authentication in CockroachDB, marking a significant shift towards modern identity protocols for database access. Traditional authentication methods like PKI, LDAP, and Kerberos, while secure, present challenges in scalability and management, especially for fully-managed cloud databases. JWT-based authentication, introduced in CockroachDB version 22.2, offers a streamlined solution by integrating with cloud-native identity providers such as Okta, GCP, Azure, and AWS, allowing users to manage authentication centrally without additional credential sets. The article details how this mechanism works for both human and application users, with a focus on CockroachDB Cloud and self-hosted clusters, and explains the ease of using JWTs through the Cloud CLI and external issuers, providing a more flexible and secure approach to database authentication.