Building a Scalable Authorization System

Table of contents
Chapter 1
Why does any application need an authorization layer?
Chapter 2
The key requirements
	Key requirement 1 – Security
	Key Requirement 2 – Reliability
	Key Requirement 3 – Speed
	Key Requirement 4 – Scalability
	Key Requirement 5 – Extensibility
	Key Requirement 6 – Great developer experience
Chapter 3
Design considerations to address the requirements
	Security
		Network connection
		Auditability
	Reliability
		High availability
		Optional schema enforcement
		Validation & testing
		Canary deployments
	Speed
		Optimized policy compilation for faster decisions
		Minimizing impact on system response time
		Telemetry for performance monitoring
	Scalability
		Stateless design
		Decreased external dependencies
		Increased compatibility
	Extensibility
		“We had a look at Cerbos and we said, “Yeah, this is future-proofing our ABAC engine,” if I can put it that way,” said Je Sum Yip, Chief Engineer, Human Managed.
		Contextual roles
		Flexible policy conditions
		Policy hierarchies and scopes
		Authorization-aware data filtering
	Great developer experience
		Simple policies
		Unit testing framework
		REPL & Playground
		IDEs integration
		SDKs for all the major languages
		AuthN ecosystem integrations
		Examples of using Cerbos in major frameworks
		Cloud Native tooling and integrations
		ORM integration for data-aware authorization
		Supports many deployment models
Parting thoughts