Microservices Security
Architecture & DesignMicroservices Security addresses the unique challenges of securing distributed applications where many independent services communicate over the network.
Service-to-Service Authentication
- IAM Roles: SigV4 signing for AWS-native service-to-service calls
- Mutual TLS (mTLS): certificate-based authentication between services (App Mesh, API Gateway)
- JWT Tokens: token-based auth issued by Cognito or custom auth service
- VPC Lattice: managed service-to-service connectivity with built-in auth
Network Segmentation
- Per-service security groups: allow only required communication paths
- AWS App Mesh: service mesh with mTLS and traffic policies
- PrivateLink: private connectivity between services in different VPCs/accounts
Additional Patterns
- API Gateway: centralized authentication, rate limiting, WAF protection
- Secrets Management: centralized credential management with Secrets Manager or SSM
- Observability: distributed tracing (X-Ray), centralized logging (CloudWatch), metrics
Related AWS Services
Related Terms
A security model where no user, device, or network is trusted by default - every access request is verified regardless of location, using identity-based policies and continuous validation.
Security controls for Amazon API Gateway including authentication, authorization, throttling, WAF integration, and mutual TLS.
Dividing a network into isolated segments (subnets, VPCs) to limit lateral movement and contain the blast radius of a security breach.
The practice of securely storing, accessing, and rotating sensitive data like API keys, database passwords, and tokens using services like AWS Secrets Manager.
Security practices for containerized workloads on AWS (ECS, EKS, Fargate) including image scanning, runtime security, and network policies.
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