How to use the AWS Workload Credentials Provider for cross-account secret retrieval and prefetching secrets

This guide covers two new features of the AWS Workload Credentials Provider: role chaining for cross-account secret retrieval and secret prefetching to reduce cold-start latency. Role chaining lets a single provider instance access secrets across AWS accounts through IAM role assumption, while prefetching populates an in-memory cache at startup. The post includes prerequisites, configuration steps, and examples of explicit secret specification and tag-based discovery.