I'm setting up Perimeter 81 for our team and hitting a snag with automated systems. We have CI/CD pipelines, data sync services, and other non-human "machine" accounts that need secure network access.
What's the best practice here? I'm thinking:
* Creating a dedicated "Service Account" group with tailored policies?
* Using the P81 API/SDK for provisioning these identities?
* How do you handle credential storage and rotation for these?
I've tried a few clunky workarounds already. Looking for the clean, scalable way to do this.
Demo or it didn't happen
We're an ecommerce analytics shop with ~30 engineers. We use Perimeter 81 for developer VPN and have about a dozen service accounts for our Databricks jobs and CI runners.
* **Service Account Cost**: This is the main catch. In Perimeter 81, every machine/service account is a billed user seat. Our plan was ~$9/user/month, so a dozen service accounts added up fast. You need to budget for that.
* **Group Policy Setup**: Create a dedicated "Service Accounts" group. The specific detail is you must assign a unique P81 identity to each machine. Then attach a network policy that only allows traffic to the exact data sync or CI endpoints it needs, nothing else. Don't reuse one identity across systems.
* **Credential Storage**: You use the P81 API to generate credentials (certificates). The specific problem is you must script the rotation. We stored the initial certs in HashiCorp Vault, but the API call for renewal is on you. There's no automatic lifecycle management for these.
* **Where It Breaks**: The client. The standard P81 VPN client doesn't run headless. For Linux machines, you must use the OpenVPN config file they provide, which works but strips away some of the managed client features. It's a weaker link.
I'd recommend their API-based approach, but only if the cost of service account seats is acceptable for your scale. To make a clean call, tell us how many service accounts you need and if you're already committed to the P81 ecosystem for your human users.
Optimize or die.
Your thought about a dedicated group for policies is exactly where we started. We use it for our drip campaign email servers. One thing I learned, though, is you really need to log what those service accounts do separately in your analytics. It's easy for their activity to get lost in the human user logs if you don't plan for that.
On credential rotation, the API helps but you still need a secure place for the new certs. We use a vault, but then you have to give your pipeline access to that vault, so it feels like a chicken-and-egg problem sometimes. Did you find a clean way to bootstrap that first secret?
You've really nailed the main pain points. The billing issue is a huge operational reality. It often forces a compromise, like reusing an identity for a tightly-related fleet of CI runners against best practice.
Your point about the client is critical. > The standard P81 VPN client doesn't run headless.
This moves the problem from policy management to platform support. We had to build internal wrapper scripts around the OpenVPN config to inject status checks and alerting we lost from the managed client. It works, but it's now custom code we own.
Have you looked at setting up a small bastion/jump host with a standard P81 client instead? It becomes a single billed seat, and your headless machines connect through it. It introduces a single point of failure, but for certain static workloads, it can simplify the client problem and reduce seat count.
The billing trap user1050 mentioned is the real kicker. Your idea of using the API for provisioning is correct, but don't sleep on the cost per seat. At scale, those service accounts can cost more than the actual compute they're running on.
For credential rotation, the API hands you a cert, but the bootstrap problem user801 mentioned is real. We've had success with a dead-simple approach: store the initial seed credential as a plaintext secret in the CI system (like GitHub Secrets or GitLab CI variables). That's your chicken *and* egg. The pipeline's first job is to use that seed to call the P81 API, fetch the new cert, and immediately rotate the seed for next time. It's a bootstrap loop, not a vault dependency.
Just make sure your network policy for that service account group is brutally minimal - only egress to the API endpoint and your required targets. Otherwise your logs become useless noise.
- elle
Yeah, you're on the right track with a dedicated group and using the API. The real friction starts when you actually implement it. The API is a bit verbose for just spinning up a single service identity. We wrote a small wrapper script that takes a machine name and a list of target CIDR blocks, creates the identity, and attaches a minimal policy. Saves a ton of time.
The credential rotation headache is real. We ended up storing the active client cert in AWS Secrets Manager, and our services have an IAM role to fetch it. The rotation lambda just calls the P81 API for a new cert and updates the secret. It pushes the complexity to the cloud provider's identity system, which is usually more built for this. It's a bit of a dance, but it works reliably.
ship it