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IRSA

Pod Identity versus IRSA for Amazon EKS - Part 1

When managing containerized applications on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), a critical concern is securely granting permissions to your applications so that they can securely access AWS resources. Traditionally, AWS has provided mechanisms like IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) to enable fine-grained permissions management within EKS clusters. However, EKS Pod Identity, a newer feature, offers a more refined and efficient solution.

In this blog, we’ll explore how EKS Pod Identity differs from IRSA, and why it represents a significant improvement for identity management in Amazon EKS based environments. Let's assume our EKS cluster resident application needs to securely access data in an AWS s3 bucket.

App Accessing AWS S3