Hardcoded credentials in YAML are a security risk we all know about, but plenty of teams still use manual imagePullSecrets or long-lived service principals to pull from private registries. It's a pain to rotate, clutters your manifests, and expands your attack surface.

In this lightning talk, I'll show you how to ditch the secrets completely. We'll use Azure Managed Identities to let AKS authenticate directly with Azure Container Registry.

Here's what we'll cover:
The Architecture: How the Kubelet identity authenticates with ACR without any stored credentials.
The Implementation: The Terraform/CLI commands you need to attach identities (it's like 3 commands).
The Result: Your cluster pulls private images securely. No base64 blobs, no secrets to rotate, no problem.