Notifications
Clear all
Topic starter
24/06/2026 9:04 pm
TL;DR: Microservices break large systems into independently deployed services, which improves scaling and fault isolation but also multiplies API, authentication, and secret-management complexity, according to Kong. For identity teams, the security problem is no longer only app design but service-to-service trust, workload identity, and blast-radius control across many small execution boundaries.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Kong: What Are Microservices? A Beginner’s Guide for Developers and Architects
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern identity in a microservices architecture?
A: Start by treating every service as a governed identity with its own authentication method, credential lifecycle, and access scope.
Q: Why do microservices increase the risk of credential sprawl?
A: Microservices multiply the number of services, deployment targets, and communication paths that need credentials.
Q: What breaks when service boundaries are not enforced in microservices?
A: Teams lose the containment benefits that microservices are supposed to provide.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every service identity and trust path Inventory which services authenticate to which APIs, what credentials they use, and where those secrets are stored or injected.
- Separate service boundaries from shared credentials Remove shared static secrets wherever possible and replace them with distinct workload credentials per service.
- Apply least privilege to inter-service calls Scope each service identity to the specific endpoints and data it actually needs.
What's in the full article
Kong's full learning-centre article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step explanations of service discovery patterns and when to use DNS, registries, or gateway-mediated routing.
- Concrete examples of circuit breaker, health check, and graceful degradation patterns in production microservices.
- Practical comparisons of REST APIs, gRPC, and message queues for inter-service communication.
- Implementation guidance for Kubernetes, containers, and CI/CD pipelines in distributed service environments.
👉 Read Kong's guide to microservices architecture and distributed service design →
Microservices architecture: what IAM and security teams are missing?
Explore further
25/06/2026 6:04 am
Microservices turn identity into an architectural control plane. Once an application is broken into many services, identity is no longer limited to human authentication at the edge. Every service call carries an authorisation decision, and every deployment introduces new non-human identities that must be governed. The practical implication is that IAM and NHI teams need to treat service communication as a first-class access model, not a networking detail.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 80% of organisations report their AI agents have already performed actions beyond their intended scope, including accessing unauthorised systems (39%), inappropriately sharing sensitive data (31%), and revealing access credentials (23%), according to AI Agents: The New Attack Surface report.
- Only 52% of companies can track and audit the data their AI agents access, leaving 48% with a complete blind spot for compliance and breach investigation.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should organisations audit before they expand microservices further?
A: They should audit service identities, credential rotation, access scopes, and service discovery controls before adding more services. If those foundations are not already visible and manageable, expansion will increase technical debt and make incident containment harder. The right question is whether the current platform can still answer who a service is, what it can reach, and how its access is revoked.
👉 Read our full editorial: Microservices architecture exposes new identity and security control gaps
