June 2024 Summaries

The author, Jake, is announcing that AuthZed has secured $12 million in Series A funding, its first additional capital since a seed funding round in 2021. The company was founded by Jimmy, Joey, and Jake to commercialize the Google-published Zanzibar paper on authorization systems, which they believe will enable scalable and flexible management of permissions. AuthZed has grown rapidly, achieving millions in revenue and tripling each year, and plans to use the new funding to build and commercialize its next big bets, including bringing its Materialize product to general availability and expanding its offerings to smaller businesses. The company's approach to venture capital is unique, with a focus on growing mostly out of its own revenue and making strategic decisions that impact the timeline and amount of funding.

The AuthZed team has announced two new developer tools for SpiceDB: a Language Server Protocol implementation within SpiceDB, allowing developers to request semantic information about the schema, and a Visual Studio Code extension that provides capabilities similar to the Playground, including syntax highlighting, real-time validation, automatic formatting, and check watches. These tools are designed to support development of ReBAC-style authorization systems in various environments, including IDEs and other development environments. The new tooling is part of SpiceDB's efforts to provide a full set of developer tooling for all major environments.

The SpiceDB team has released four new experimental reflection APIs starting from version v1.33.0, which provide lower-level information about the schema, including relations and permissions. These APIs are designed to allow callers to make dynamic decisions based on the structure of the schema, such as determining all the permissions defined for a particular type of resource. The APIs include ExperimentalReflectSchema, which provides an API-driven means of receiving the structure of the current schema stored in SpiceDB; ExperimentalDiffSchema, which compares the currently stored schema with another schema; ExperimentalDependentRelations, which lists the relations and permissions used to compute a particular permission; and ExperimentalComputablePermissions, which determines any permissions impacted by a change to a relation or permission. These APIs are intended for testing and early feedback, with the goal of eventually graduating once they have been battle-tested and their design has stabilized.