Best practices for authentication
Authentication refers to the action of performing login to a VM, using either local authentication (using Secure Shell (SSH) key authentication to Linux machines) or domain-joined authentication (that is, authentication against a central directory service).
CSPs do not have access to customers’ VMs. When deploying a new VM instance, you need to configure credentials to access the VM for remote control, login (as a local or domain identity), and maintenance of the VM.
The most common way to locally authenticate to a Windows VM is using a username and password, while in a Linux VM, the most common way is to use SSH key authentication.
Amazon, Azure, and Google support the following methods to authenticate to EC2, Azure VMs, and GCE instances, respectively:
- Local authentication – This method is used for unmanaged EC2 instances
- Central authentication – This method is used for EC2 instances joined to a domain (as...
