May 2021 Summaries

Working remotely during a global pandemic has presented unique challenges for Authzed, an early-stage startup building a Google-class permissions service. To overcome these challenges, the team has adopted several strategies that promote productivity and collaboration, including written communication as their primary form of interaction, intentionally scheduled meetings, and structured daily stand-ups to track progress. These practices have helped maintain transparency, accountability, and visibility into individual objectives, while also fostering deeply connected moments among team members. By embracing healthy tensions and managing conflict effectively, the team has achieved a harmonious balance between autonomy and shared goals, ultimately leading to better solutions for their users.

You're tasked with enhancing a user's profile page to display all resources they can access, but doing so requires touching the permission system, which is stored in SQL. The permission system has multiple tables and joins are needed to fetch data, resulting in high latency. After discussing with the code-owners, they propose denormalizing their schema for better performance, but it's a major rewrite and security critical. You're left to balance delivering value with robustness and long-term maintenance. The problem is ACL filtering, which can be achieved through prefiltering or postfiltering methods. Prefiltering determines accessible objects before fetching, while postfiltering discards fetched objects based on access. The query planner's performance prediction for JOINs is uncertain, making it challenging to decide between relational databases and alternative solutions like Authzed.

Google Zanzibar is a globally distributed authorization system capable of processing over 10 million client queries per second. It was built by Google to address the limitations of their previous permissions systems and to provide a flexible, scalable, and reliable solution for managing user and data relationships across multiple applications and services. The system uses a directed graph representation of relationships between users, resources, and other entities to compute permissions decisions, which are then made available through an API that can be used by developers to outsource their user and data relationships. Zanzibar achieves low latency and high scale by distributing its load across thousands of servers organized in clusters around the world, using caching and consistent hashing to improve performance, and leveraging Google's planet-scale database system, Spanner, for data storage. The system also includes features such as request hedging and denormalization to further reduce tail latencies.

The Stripe landing page is a great example of an informative landing page that utilizes movement and animation to convey information effectively. The Authzed team aimed to replicate this by building their own animated code example component, which they have now made open source. They chose to use React and Monaco as the foundation for the component, leveraging its syntax highlighting and formatting capabilities to create a realistic code editor experience. The component is designed to simulate human-like typing behavior, including delays for specific characters, making it more engaging and interactive. Once complete, the team utilized IntersectionObserver to start the animation only when the component became visible on the page, ensuring a seamless user experience.