Well, the question was about how often is it used, not how well it serves the purpose. So I'd say pretty often. Having a data storage accessible for every serv

Well, the question was about how often is it used, not how well it serves the purpose. So I'd say pretty often. Having a data storage accessible for every service that needs authentication and authorization (and ideally every service needs at least authentication) is non trivial in distributed enterprise environment. To have a stateful token, you need to have a distributed scalable storage, unless you have only one instance. You need to be able to connect to it, hence distribute and manage database password. Anything symmetric requires a more sophisticated secret management.