User authentication

Review the following topics to learn about authentication in your Elasticsearch cluster:

• Learn about the available realms that you can use to authenticate users
• Manage passwords for built-in users
• Manage users natively
• Integrate with external authentication providers using external realms:
  • Active Directory
  • JWT
  • Kerberos
  • LDAP
  • OpenID Connect
  • SAML
  • PKI
  • Implement a custom realm
• Configure file-based authentication
• Enable anonymous access
• Set up a user access agreement

• Learn about internal users, which are responsible for the operations that take place inside an Elasticsearch cluster.
• Learn about service accounts, which are used for integration with external services that connect to Elasticsearch
• Learn about the services used for token-based authentication
• Learn about the services used by orchestrators (applies to Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud Hosted, and Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes)
• Manage user profiles
• Learn about user lookup technologies
• Manage the user cache
• Manage authentication for multiple clusters using Elastic Stack configuration policies (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes only)