How One Developer Replaced AWS Long-Lived Keys with OIDC on EKS CI Pipeline

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A developer building a 3-tier application on Amazon EKS initially stored long-lived AWS access keys in GitHub repository settings to enable automated deployments via GitHub Actions. Recognising the security risks — including key leakage, lack of expiry, and difficult rotation — the developer replaced them with OpenID Connect (OIDC)-based authentication. With OIDC, GitHub Actions mints a short-lived token per job, which AWS STS validates against a registered identity provider and an IAM role trust policy before issuing temporary credentials. A key insight shared is that passing IAM authentication is only half the challenge, as EKS maintains its own separate authorization layer that must also be configured. The trust policy's subject condition is highlighted as critical, since it controls precisely which GitHub jobs — such as only the main branch — are permitted to assume the deployment role.

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