Enterprise organizations increasingly operate across multiple cloud providers. Managing identities separately in each cloud creates complexity, security gaps, and operational overhead. This lab teaches you to implement unified identity federation where a single identity source (Azure AD/Entra ID) provides seamless, secure access to AWS, GCP, and CI/CD systems—all without long-lived credentials.
The goal of multi-cloud identity federation is simple: one identity, many clouds, zero long-lived credentials. Users authenticate once to a central IdP and can access resources across all cloud providers. Workloads use federated identities instead of stored secrets.
IAM Users/Roles, Identity Center, STS, OIDC Federation
Users/Groups, Service Principals, Managed Identity, App Registrations
Google Accounts, Service Accounts, Workload Identity Federation
| Pattern | Description | Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| User Federation | IdP → AWS/GCP Console SSO | Human users accessing cloud consoles |
| Workload Identity | CI/CD → Cloud without secrets | GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins deploying to cloud |
| Service-to-Service | Cloud A workload → Cloud B API | AWS Lambda calling GCP API |
| Cross-Account | Account A → Account B in same cloud | Centralized operations across accounts |
Central IdP
Federation
Identity Center
Workload Identity
Employees sign in once via Entra ID and access AWS, Azure, and GCP consoles.
GitHub Actions deploys to AWS, Azure, and GCP using federated identity—no stored secrets.
AWS Lambda processes data and writes to GCP BigQuery using federated credentials.
All cloud access logs centralized for compliance and security monitoring.
Set up Entra ID as the single source of truth for identities.
Enable SSO from Entra ID to AWS using SAML and IAM Identity Center.
Enable SSO from Entra ID to GCP using Workforce Identity Federation.
Configure GitHub Actions to deploy to all clouds using OIDC federation.
Enable AWS workloads to access GCP APIs and vice versa.
Implement unified governance across all cloud providers.
Create unified audit trail for compliance and security monitoring.
Manage cross-cloud IAM configuration with Terraform.