on and credentials passed as environment variablessome form of implicit authentication attached to the workload environment itself. This is only available in virtual environments that are already running inside the same cloud where other resources are available for use. This is called differently depending on the cloud provider in question, but they are essentially the same thing:in AWS, if you're running on Amazon EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, or some other form of AWS cloud workload, credentials can be loaded directly from the instance metadata service. This uses the IAM role attached to your workload to authenticate to other AWS services without the need to configure explicit credentials.in GCP, a similar metadata service allows accessing other GCP cloud resources via the service account attached to the GCP workload (e.g. GCP VMs or GKE clusters).in Azure, the Azure Managed Identity services can be used to gain access to other Azure services without requiring explicit credentials

There are a few caveats that you should be aware of when choosing an implicit authentication method. It may seem like the easiest way out, but it carries with it some implications that may impact portability and usability later down the road:

when used with a local ZenML deployment, like the default deployment, or a local ZenML server started with zenml up, the implicit authentication method will use the configuration files and credentials or environment variables set up on your local machine. These will not be available to anyone else outside your local environment and will also not be accessible to workloads running in other environments on your local host. This includes for example local K3D Kubernetes clusters and local Docker containers.