The end of static secrets: Ford’s OpenShift strategy

The end of static secrets: Ford’s OpenShift strategy Managing 200+ clusters Automation and identity: The keyless mandate Governance: PoC and admission control Building the foundational infrastructure for AI Ready to build your own keyless, automated Red Hat OpenShift platform? Red Hat Learning Subscription | Product Trial About the author Debbie Margulies More like this F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition is now validated for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 4) The Containers_Derby | Command Line Heroes Can Kubernetes Help People Find Love? | Compiler Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share At Red Hat OpenShift Commons Gathering in Atlanta on November 10, 2025, Satish Puranam, Director of Cloud and Developer Experience at Ford, and Sitaram Iyer, VP of Emerging Technologies at CyberArk, outlined how Ford manages over 200 Red Hat OpenShift clusters amid a complex digital transition. Their strategy relies on a single, non-negotiable mandate: everything must be keyless. Image 1: From left, Satish Puranam, Director of Cloud and Developer Experience at Ford, and Sitaram Iyer, VP of Emerging Technologies at CyberArk. To achieve this scale, Ford has abandoned static secrets entirely, implementing 100% identity-driven automation and Policy as Code (PoC) enforcement directly on the Kubernetes platform. Ford’s Red Hat OpenShift footprint spans diverse workloads, from consumer-facing applications to highly regulated manufacturing and warranty systems. This highly dynamic environment requires clusters to be regularly spun up and torn down, often pushing core Kubernetes limits (such as etcd capacity) and necessitating constant defragmentation or provisioning of new clusters. To manage this scale, Ford imposes strict guardrails and standardizes on Red Hat OpenShift across its multicloud and multi-datacenter infrastructure. As Satish noted, "Our decades-long journey is all about hiding complexity and barriers for the developer. You learn it once, use it over and over again, and it scales very well. It allows us to actually update and upgrade our systems at a rapid clip. " Image 2: Ford’s journey with Red Hat OpenShift By standardizing the platform, Ford can upgrade systems rapidly without burdening teams with infrastructure friction. Ford’s scaling strategy eliminates long-lived, static credentials, or "secrets," in favor of 100% automated machine identity.