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Cloud IAM Fundamentals
How identities, roles, policies, scopes, and temporary credentials map across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with practical access troubleshooting.
What is the difference between authentication and authorization in a cloud IAM context?
Authentication answers "who is making this request", verifying an identity via credentials, a token, or a federated login. Authorization answers "is this identity allowed to do this specific action on this specific resource", evaluated after authentication succeeds, by checking the identity's attached policies against the requested action. A request can be perfectly authenticated (the caller genuinely is who they claim) and still be denied, because authorization is a separate check against what that identity is actually permitted to do.
What is an app registration in Entra ID, and why do workloads need one?
An app registration creates an application object that defines the application globally in its home tenant: client ID, redirect URIs, credentials, and requested API permissions. A service principal is the tenant-local instance that is actually assigned permissions and used during sign-in. Managed identities are a different Azure-managed form of service principal for Azure resources; you do not create or maintain an app registration or credential for them manually.
What is a managed identity, and what problem does it solve compared to a service principal with a client secret?
A managed identity is an Entra ID identity automatically managed by Azure for a resource (a VM, an App Service, a Function), with credentials that Azure handles entirely, no client secret is ever stored, retrieved, or rotated by the application. A traditional service principal with a client secret requires that secret to be stored somewhere (a config file, a key vault) and rotated manually or via automation, which is itself a credential-management burden and a leak risk. Managed identities remove that burden for the common case of "this Azure resource needs to authenticate to another Azure service," which is why they're preferred whenever the workload runs on Azure compute.