Automated management of system credentials

Abstract

One disclosed aspect of the present invention includes authentication and user account automation within a compute cluster for each cluster node that requires password or other credential administration. For example, a storage appliance computing system may rely on a plurality of subsystems (such as databases, storage management software, and application servers) that each have internal user accounts with associated passwords and credential keys that need to be changed at frequent intervals. Rather than requiring an administrator to manually manage all of these accounts, the presently described invention includes techniques and an authentication manager component to automatically manage, update, and refresh authentication information as required. Further, the authentication manager component may be used to perform and propagate automatic credential changes such as new sets of SSH keys or updated passwords as required within a computing system, and respond to new nodes or out-of-sync credentialing scenarios.