From what I have seen this subject needs a lot more attention than what it receives which translates in the reality that in almost majority of the places the access rules are pretty open from inside. This is one area where centralization (using some solution like AuthZed) and decentralization (skipping the checks based on business domain locally) present this healthy tension which requires some one who has expertise on the business domain to make it work efficiently
I love reading posts like this because it shows that authorization isn't as niche as it once was. I also empathize with avoiding dependencies when you ship enterprise software for running on-prem; we abused Postgres a lot while serving enterprise customers for Quay before we founded AuthZed/SpiceDB. As an engineer it's your job to decide when is the right time to use a dedicated system or continue to invest in your own.
I can't help but see the similarities in their design to concepts from Zanzibar/SpiceDB, and that's great! It also means if they ever do encounter a situation where the existing system is no longer viable (engineers leave or a new design constraint requires rethinking), they _can_ migrate to a dedicated solution easily.
One trade-off I didn't see acknowledged in this post is the sacrifice in terms of tooling. Dedicated solutions have toolchains for debugging and proving correctness that you can integrate into CI/CD and homegrown solutions can't typically spare the time to also build themselves a nice toolchain.
Maybe it's because I'm not an RBAC expert, but I had a hard time understanding the data model for folders. Are they a subject? And then there's a layered CASL where layers overwrite each other? And the user is an actor?
I thoroughly enjoyed this read. As it states at the beginning: rbac is necessary, yet not sexy. I don't use infiscal, yet this post was quite a good insight. Thanks for sharing it!
> That’s also because we didn’t migrate to a Zanzibar-style system like SpiceDB or OpenFGA. Adopting one would mean rewriting every permission check and asking every self-hosted customer to run another stateful service and introduce breaking changes.
9 comments:
From what I have seen this subject needs a lot more attention than what it receives which translates in the reality that in almost majority of the places the access rules are pretty open from inside. This is one area where centralization (using some solution like AuthZed) and decentralization (skipping the checks based on business domain locally) present this healthy tension which requires some one who has expertise on the business domain to make it work efficiently
I love reading posts like this because it shows that authorization isn't as niche as it once was. I also empathize with avoiding dependencies when you ship enterprise software for running on-prem; we abused Postgres a lot while serving enterprise customers for Quay before we founded AuthZed/SpiceDB. As an engineer it's your job to decide when is the right time to use a dedicated system or continue to invest in your own.
I can't help but see the similarities in their design to concepts from Zanzibar/SpiceDB, and that's great! It also means if they ever do encounter a situation where the existing system is no longer viable (engineers leave or a new design constraint requires rethinking), they _can_ migrate to a dedicated solution easily.
One trade-off I didn't see acknowledged in this post is the sacrifice in terms of tooling. Dedicated solutions have toolchains for debugging and proving correctness that you can integrate into CI/CD and homegrown solutions can't typically spare the time to also build themselves a nice toolchain.
Maybe they don’t like opt-out telemetry?
Maybe it's because I'm not an RBAC expert, but I had a hard time understanding the data model for folders. Are they a subject? And then there's a layered CASL where layers overwrite each other? And the user is an actor?
The https://casl.js.org/v7/en/ link is dead
edit: fixed now
I thoroughly enjoyed this read. As it states at the beginning: rbac is necessary, yet not sexy. I don't use infiscal, yet this post was quite a good insight. Thanks for sharing it!
I think this is true of security features, and even security teams in general. Only noticed in their absence
But why not Zanzibar?
> That’s also because we didn’t migrate to a Zanzibar-style system like SpiceDB or OpenFGA. Adopting one would mean rewriting every permission check and asking every self-hosted customer to run another stateful service and introduce breaking changes.