ECS 3.6.1 Administration Guide

Introduction to authentication providers

You can add authentication providers to ECS if you want users to be authenticated by systems external to ECS.

An authentication provider is a system that is external to ECS that can authenticate users on behalf of ECS. ECS stores the information that allows it to connect to the authentication provider so that ECS can request authentication of a user.

In ECS, the following types of authentication provider are available:

• Active Directory (AD) authentication or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication: Used to authenticate domain users that are assigned to management roles in ECS.
• Keystone: Used to authenticate OpenStack Swift object users.

Authentication providers can be created from the ECS Portal or by using the ECS Management REST API or CLI.