February 2021 Summaries

The Authzed playground is a web-based application that allows developers to create, edit, and validate namespace configurations for their applications. It provides a sandboxed environment where developers can experiment with different configurations without affecting their production systems. The playground uses gRPC Web to interact with the Authzed API, which provides validation services for namespaces. Monaco Editor is used to provide syntax highlighting and code editing capabilities for the namespace configurations. The playground also includes features such as sharing, which allows users to share their configurations with others. The sharing feature uses a unique hashed reference to identify the contents of the playground, and it can be loaded from a shared URL. Overall, the Authzed playground provides a powerful tool for developers to manage permissions in their applications.

The interns' last day had arrived, marking the end of their summer internship. To celebrate, colleagues organized an "intern review party," where they shared humorous anecdotes about bugs the interns tried to sneak through code review during the summer. However, a door controller delay caused Timmy's access to be revoked too late, allowing him to witness the celebration and subsequently dash out of the office in embarrassment. This incident highlighted the importance of permissions checking in distributed systems, particularly when dealing with replication delays that can break causal ordering requirements. The story illustrates the need for careful consideration of synchronization between parties in a system, as well as the difficulty of ensuring permissions checking accuracy across multiple components. To address this challenge, a system like Authzed, which uses opaque tokens (Zookies) to enforce causal ordering between mutations and permissions checks, can provide a solution to prevent such issues from occurring.

The current state of permissions systems is complex and often inadequate, with many companies relying on pre-shared key basic auth, ownership inference based on object IDs, or single tenancy with no permissions at all. The ideal permissions system should have four main properties: correctness, uniform way to model and check permissions from polyglot services and applications, reliability, and scalability, with fast performance usually implying denormalization such as caching. Authzed is a multi-tenant permissions system as a service that allows companies to model their own permissions system exactly as their app requires, without the need for code changes, and provides a reliable and scalable solution that can grow with the company's needs.