September 2018 Summaries

FusionAuth is a single-tenant solution that supports multiple tenants within a single instance. This allows clients to create separate namespaces for their clients, enabling each client to manage their users, permissions, and user details discretely. Tenants are useful for organizations with multiple environments such as development, staging, and production, where a single instance of FusionAuth can be used to service multiple environments, reducing complexity and infrastructure costs. Additionally, tenants enable the creation of separate identities for clients, which is necessary when a platform needs to provide different authentication resources for each client. This feature also allows developers to create their own tenant so they can develop, create, and delete users without affecting the rest of their team.

The author of the text wanted to display the download count of FusionAuth on their dashboard. To achieve this, they wrote a Ruby script that downloads access logs from Google Cloud Storage, extracts the download counts using regular expressions, and writes them out in a CSV file that can be used by Cyfe's dashboard system. The script also filters out whitelisted IP addresses to exclude them from the download count. The script is deployed on an hourly basis to ensure it runs every hour and rebuilds the CSV file. The author uses this setup to track downloads of FusionAuth in real-time, making it easier to measure its usage and effectiveness.

Active Directory and FusionAuth are both identity management solutions but cater to different needs and functionalities. Active Directory was developed for centralized domain management within Windows networks, while FusionAuth is tailored for managing large-scale applications with thousands to millions of users, embodying a Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) approach. Despite sharing features like OAuth token management, multi-factor authentication, and both on-prem and private cloud deployment options, FusionAuth distinguishes itself by offering free unlimited user access without feature limitations, customizable email communications, localization capabilities, and configurable password encryption. It also addresses enterprise identity unification challenges by allowing companies to manage distinct user datasets under a single system with incremental control. Unlike Active Directory, which aligns closely with Microsoft's ecosystem, FusionAuth offers bespoke customization and support, catering to unique client requirements without the constraints of corporate bureaucracy.

This is a summary of how FusionAuth builds its website. They use Bootstrap Studio to generate HTML, which is then converted to Jekyll pages using a Ruby script. The conversion includes tasks such as removing unnecessary tags, adding Jekyll-specific syntax, and copying assets from the Bootstrap Studio directory. Once the HTML is converted, it's deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance using Savant, a build tool that automates the deployment process. The site is built using base Jekyll with plugins like jekyll-paginate for blog list pages and jekyll-asciidoc for documentation. The deployment process involves pushing changes from the GitHub repository to the server, which then updates the project and runs a Jekyll build. The resulting HTML is copied to the server's `/var/www/fusionauth.io` directory, where it's served by Apache. The site also includes integrations with Mailchimp and Formspree.io for email and contact forms, respectively.