July 29, 2026 · security, identity, oci

Short take: per-node credentials break multi-agent fleets on OKE

The problem: AI agents on OKE each need scoped access to OCI (and external APIs) — without one shared credential for the whole fleet. On AWS/GCP that path is named and documented. On OCI you wire SPIFFE through generic Workload Identity Federation yourself.

We hit a related bridge problem in 2021–22 (custom app ↔ Fusion / standalone IDCS). Unified Identity Domains largely retired that hand-built broker. Same shape today, one layer over: SPIFFE/SPIRE has no first-class console option in OCI IAM, while AWS Roles Anywhere and GCP WIF do.

OpenAI’s Workload Identity Federation supports OCI — but on OKE, instance principals identify the worker node, not the pod. Three agents on one node look identical unless SPIFFE issues per-workload SVIDs.

Native SPIFFE support in Identity Domains (Roles Anywhere–class ergonomics) would let IAM evaluate per-agent, not per-node.

Full writeup (SPIRE install, trust API, token examples, FastMCP east-west):
The credential every AI agent fleet on an OKE node ends up sharing

CAN scaffolding: SPIFFE/SPIRE + OCI WIF design