Announcing Snowflake Dynamic and Rotated Credentials with Pulumi ESC

Claire Gaestel — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Snowflake is the data cloud powerhouse for countless businesses, critical for everything from customer dashboards to billing pipelines. The stakes are immense: this data must be strictly secured and always available. But managing this with static credentials or manual key rotation creates persistent security vulnerabilities and introduces operational instability, risking disruptions during clumsy updates. Pulumi ESC eliminates this dilemma with two purpose-built Snowflake integrations:

snowflake-login: Provides dynamic, short-lived OIDC tokens for temporary authentication to Snowflake.
snowflake-user: Automates the rotation of RSA keypair secrets for Snowflake users, essential for secure key-pair authentication.

Pulumi ESC allows you to securely manage and consume these Snowflake credentials in your applications, development workflows through ESC SDK, Pulumi CLI, Kubernetes integrations, and more!

Use the snowflake-login provider when you need temporary, just-in-time credentials to interact with Snowflake, such as from local development environments, CI/CD pipelines, or scripts. It leverages OIDC to mint short-lived access tokens, eliminating the need to store static tokens.

This approach significantly reduces the attack surface by removing long-lived credentials required for authentication.

Setup:

Configure OIDC in Snowflake: Create a Security Integration in Snowflake to trust the Pulumi OIDC provider (https://api.pulumi.com/oidc), map the appropriate user claims and create a Snowflake user. Check out the docs] for more details
Configure ESC Environment: Define the snowflake-login provider in your ESC environment, specifying the Snowflake account and the user configured for OIDC.

# my-org/logins/snowflake
values:
 snowflake:
 login:
 fn::open::snowflake-login:
 oidc:
 account: myorganization-account
 user: ESC_LOGIN_USER
 role: ESC_ROLE  # Optional

When this environment is opened, ESC securely handles the OIDC flow and makes the temporary token available under snowflake.login.token.

snowflake-user: Automated Rotation for RSA Key Secrets

For applications or services using Snowflake’s key-pair authentication, maintaining the security of those RSA keys is crucial. The snowflake-user rotator automates the lifecycle management of these keys as rotated secrets within ESC. This rotater uses the same two-secret rotation strategy we use in rest of ESC’s rotated secrets providers. This eliminates manual rotation toil and ensures keys are regularly refreshed according to policy, enhancing the security of the user secret itself. Check out the rotated secrets blog post to learn more about its benefits.

Setup:

Prepare Snowflake:
- Create the target user (e.g., MY_APP_SNOWFLAKE_USER) whose keys need rotation.
- Set up a dedicated rotation role with OWNERSHIP permission over the users you wish to rotate, so it can modify their keys.
- Create a service user using the rotation role, and setup OIDC to allow ESC to assume the role for rotation.
Rotation Environment: Define the rotation, importing the managing credentials and specifying the target user.

# Environment: my-org/rotators/snowflake-app-key
values:
 rotatedKey:
 fn::rotate::snowflake-user:
 inputs:
 login: ${environments.logins.snowflake.snowflake.login} #reference credentials created using `snowflake-login`
 targetUser: ESC_ROTATION_DEMO_USER # User whose keys rotate

After setup, use the triple-dot menu -> “Rotate Secrets” in the Pulumi Cloud UI and ensure rotation happens. Once you rotate a couple of time and ensured everything works well, navigate to the “Secret Rotation” tab for your Rotation environment in the Pulumi Cloud console and define the rotation schedule.

Feature	`snowflake-login` (Dynamic OIDC Login)	`snowflake-user` (Rotated Secrets)
Credential Type	Short-lived OIDC access token	Long-lived RSA Private Key secret (managed by ESC) + Public Keys (in Snowflake)
Primary Use Case	Temporary authentication to Snowflake (CLI, scripts, dev, CI/CD).	Key-pair authentication for long-lived applications/services connecting to Snowflake.
Ideal Scenario	Short-lived tasks; frequent, temporary access needs.	Applications needing persistent connections; keys required at deploy time; apps sensitive to auth blips.
Lifecycle	Generated on-demand, expires quickly (minutes/hours).	Rotated automatically on a schedule (e.g., days/months).
Connection Impact	Requires re-authentication or new token fetch when token expires.	Rotation is typically seamless; two-key strategy avoids connection drops if apps update keys promptly.
Benefit Focus	Eliminates static authentication tokens/credentials.	Automates lifecycle management of user key-pair secrets, ensures key freshness.

Conclusion

Pulumi ESC’s new Snowflake integrations provide robust solutions for modern credential management challenges. Use snowflake-login for secure, temporary OIDC-based access and snowflake-user to automate the rotation of critical RSA key secrets. By adopting these capabilities, you can significantly enhance your Snowflake security posture, reduce operational overhead, and simplify compliance.

Explore the detailed documentation for snowflake-login and snowflake-user, and see how Pulumi ESC can centralize and secure your configuration and secrets across all your environments. Join the conversation in the Pulumi Community Slack or our GitHub repository.

Pulumi Blog: Dynamic login

Announcing Snowflake Dynamic and Rotated Credentials with Pulumi ESC

snowflake-login: Dynamic OIDC Authentication for Temporary Access

snowflake-user: Automated Rotation for RSA Key Secrets

When to Use Dynamic Login vs. Rotated Secrets

Conclusion