How to Carry User Identity Across Federated Kubernetes and AI Platforms

A centralized identity gateway pattern decouples session ownership from request enforcement across federated Kubernetes clusters, letting regional gateways validate user identities via a shared Redis‑backed session store instead of independent OIDC flows. At NVIDIA this approach cut repeated login events by 55 % for internal developer platforms spanning AWS and OCI, enabling unified platform shells, AI assistants, and delegated identity while standardizing identity headers and coordinating token refresh/logout across the entire stack. The architecture leverages OpenID Connect with a minimal /gateway/userinfo endpoint, stateless regional gateways, mutual TLS or workload‑identity security, explicit TTLs for sessions, and guardrails such as header stripping/injection and session‑store failure handling, optionally augmented with OPA policy evaluation.

Source: NVIDIA Developer | 2026-09-03