Company
Date Published
Author
Joey Schorr
Word count
1162
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In modern multi-user or multi-tenant applications, providing each user with their own "view" of resources is a challenge due to scalability issues. The problem arises from checking every resource against the current user's set of permissions, which can be time-consuming and inefficient when dealing with large numbers of resources. Traditional approaches such as joining the resource table with the permissions tables or using Policy Engines often result in significant overhead and increased query times. However, Authzed's graph-based permission system allows for computing complex permissions hierarchies and provides an opportunity to use graph-based optimizations to perform faster computation. By reversing a permissions check and utilizing map-reduce operations, an ACL-aware indexing solution can be achieved, enabling efficient and scalable filtering of resources based on user permissions.