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Pipelines & scenarios · Design & Scenarios

What is least privilege?

Mediumpipe-30
least privilegeIAMRBACsecurityaccess control

Question

What does least privilege mean for data pipelines and platform access?

Solution

Least privilege means every user, service account, and job gets only the permissions required to do its job, nothing more.

BAD:
  spark-etl-role = s3:* on all buckets + admin on warehouse

GOOD:
  spark-etl-role:
    read  s3://lake/bronze/orders/*
    write s3://lake/silver/orders/*
    no delete on gold BI schemas
    no IAM admin

Why it matters

Limits blast radius of a leaked key, a buggy job, or a compromised account. A transform job should not be able to drop production gold tables "by accident."

Apply least privilege to

  • Cloud IAM roles for each pipeline identity
  • Warehouse roles (raw reader ≠ mart owner ≠ analyst)
  • Orchestrator connections and secrets scope
  • Human access (prod write vs read-only)

Related ideas

Separation of duties (who deploys vs who approves), short-lived credentials, and periodic access reviews.

Interview tip: Define least privilege, give a pipeline role example with narrow S3/SQL paths, and mention blast-radius reduction. That is the security answer interviewers want.

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