December 2022 Summaries

The authors of SpiceDB reflect on their journey from reading a research paper in 2019 to launching their company and achieving significant milestones in 2022. They discuss the challenges they faced with their container registry product, Quay, and how it led them to develop SpiceDB as a solution to those problems. The team highlights various achievements in 2022, including tripled releases, support for multiple datastores, improved performance, and deeper integration with Kubernetes. The community also grew significantly, with increased engagement on Discord, GitHub, and StackOverflow. The company launched new initiatives, such as zanzibar.tech and SpiceDB Dedicated, and welcomed new team members. Looking ahead, the authors share predictions for the future of databases, platform engineering, AI-generated content, and more.

The Zanzibar paper has had a significant impact on the development of permissions systems, inspiring the creation of SpiceDB, which is now powering permissions in hundreds of applications. To help new readers understand and interpret the paper, the team behind SpiceDB has created an annotated copy, including additional information and open questions from their experience implementing the concepts and features explained in the paper. The team has also developed a Playground, authzed.com, where users can try out the concepts and implementation, as well as open sourcing the repository behind the annotated paper experience to allow for further contributions and annotations.