Managing Non-Human Identities in Site Reliability Engineering

Non-human identities now outnumber human accounts in most production environments. Service accounts, CI/CD pipelines, bots, and automated scripts make requests, deploy infrastructure, and push code. In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), these identities are as critical as the engineers themselves—but harder to track, secure, and audit.

Ignoring non-human identities is a security and reliability risk. They often have broad permissions, live in multiple systems, and are created without consistent lifecycle management. An unused human account might be noticed. An abandoned service account can operate silently until it is exploited.

Managing non-human identities in SRE requires precise control:

• Inventory across all systems and environments, with the ability to see every service account and its activity in real time.
• Principle of least privilege, applying minimal access even for automation to reduce breach potential.
• Rotations and expirations for API keys, tokens, and credentials used by automated systems.
• Continuous audit trails to trace every automated change, deployment, or request back to its source identity.
• Integration with CI/CD security gates so new non-human accounts cannot slip into production unnoticed.

Scalability and security depend on removing blind spots in non-human identity management. In complex systems, SREs must treat these identities as first-class citizens of the security and reliability model. Automation should be fast, but never anonymous.

The future of SRE is not only about keeping services up—it’s about ensuring every actor in your system, human or not, is accountable, observable, and under control.

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