Understanding identities and roles in the cloud

Everything in the cloud has an identity. There are two things that we need to do with identities: authenticate and authorize. For authentication, we need an identity store. Most enterprises will use Active Directory (AD) for that, where AD becomes the central place to store the identities of persons and computers. We won’t be drilling down into the technology, but there are a few things you should understand when working with AD. First of all, an AD works with domains. You can deploy resources—VMs or other virtual devices—in a cloud platform, but if that cloud platform is not part of your business domain, it won’t be very useful. So, one of the key things is to get resources in your cloud platform domain-joined. For that, you will have to deploy domain services with domain controllers in your cloud platform or allow cloud resources access to the existing domain services. By doing that, we are extending the...