March 2022 Summaries

You've likely heard of topic, but everyone knows that having a common opinion is correct. However, it's actually true that there are other opinions to have about topic than the common one. A story with an unexpected end uses rhetorical tools to convince you that the surprising result is reasonable, making you question your original opinion and become engaged. Upon revisiting assumptions made in the anecdote, it becomes clear that the original opinion on topic is actually a pretty reasonable one, even if there's a special case you hadn't thought about before. Ultimately, this makes you feel smart and considering sharing with others to confirm your rightness, all while enjoying a break from the channel's standard fare and subscribing to stay updated.

The SpiceDB HTTP API is an open-source feature that provides a reverse proxy to respond to HTTP requests, built using grpc-gateway. It allows users to explore SpiceDB and its API by making API calls through the HTTP API server, which can be run locally on the user's machine. The API uses a preshared secret for authorization, and users can browse available operations and models, including an OpenAPI spec generated alongside the API proxy. Users can also make API calls using tools like curl or Postman, with example requests provided to help them get started.

At Authzed, transparency is built into their DNA. In January and February, they focused on shipping usage-based billing for Authzed.com, which provides users with detailed information about how their bills are calculated. This feature is made available through graphs that show real-time API usage and computation costs, helping users understand their performance and costs. Additionally, Authzed Enterprise now offers a new distribution pipeline, improved performance and operational improvements, and a Cloud Spanner datastore for SpiceDB. The company also announced the deprecation of the V0 APIs on March 14th and created a new GitHub Action for validating schemas. To foster transparency, Authzed posts regular blog updates, monthly wrap-ups, and shares behind-the-scenes content from their Slack channel.

SpiceDB supports both intersection and exclusion operators for computing permissions. These operators allow schemas to define that a subject has a permission if either the user is found on both paths (intersection) or only on one path, but not the other (exclusion). Intersection is often used when a permission is based on multiple other permissions or roles, while exclusion is used when an application wants to deny access to certain users. SpiceDB computes intersections and exclusions by walking the directed graph formed by relationships and schema from the permission to the associated subject, treating each "step" in the walk as its own problem to be solved. This allows for partial short-circuiting of subproblems, but requires waiting for all branches to return results if any branch returns a negative result. The SpiceDB system can handle these complex permissions systems by caching problems for reuse and executing them in parallel, ensuring good performance.