How to create an identity federation between GCP and AWS using Tines

In a guest blog post, Marcus Hallberg and Attila Dulovics, senior security engineers at Spotify, describe a Tines workflow they developed to facilitate identity federation between Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies due to business needs such as acquisitions and partner integrations, identity federation becomes crucial for enabling secure and efficient access to resources across different cloud environments with a single set of credentials. This process involves exchanging authorized identities based on pre-established trust relationships, allowing, for instance, a GCP service account to access AWS resources without static credentials. The authors illustrate this with a specific example of enabling a Google service account to list AWS S3 buckets by utilizing Google’s OpenID Connect infrastructure and configuring AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles accordingly. This setup not only streamlines cross-cloud access but also enhances security by reducing the need for service account keys, and it facilitates automation for tasks ranging from cloud security to regular operations. The blog post also offers additional resources, including a GitHub repository and a Tines story, to help users implement and test this identity federation approach.