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Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

clerk.dev

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Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#221

Post by hmsimha »

mooreds wrote: post #33
taytus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my question as well. It's an honest question and hopefully someone can educate me. Why would anyone trust a third party with what is the most important asset, their users? Thank you in advance.

Hiya, First off, full disclosure: I don't work for Clerk; I work for a competitor which offers overlapping functionality, FusionAuth: https://fusionauth.io I think a sibling comment laid it out well. It's a tradeoff. You are giving up some control over how your users are stored for significant acceleration of functionality. We've had customers say we saved them 1-2 person months of time in initial build, never mind o…

> Another consideration: you want the ability to export your users should you want to move services. People who aren't self hosting with FusionAuth can get a database export from us, for example, if they want to migrate.

It's not even worth evaluating at the free tier without this. I asked in their slack and they said they intend to support this, which is promising (though sounds like it's not implemented yet)

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#222

Post by aryamaan »

Congrats on the launch!

I have started using Keycloak for one of my side projects. I am unable to get my head around it and was pondering there should be a Keycloak as a service.

Also, solving the trust part is one challenge which I hope you folks would handle.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#223

Post by markdown »

XCSme wrote: post #216
markdown wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For me it is also a red flag to include third party CDN JS Why anyone would use third party js for anything other than dev work is beyond me. Are people really building websites that can serve html, images, and css, but not js?

I think that most 3rd party providers say "DON'T HOST THIS FILE LOCALLY AS IT WILL BREAK WHEN WE MAKE UPDATES".

Which of course makes no sense. Why would any action they take have anything to do with a website that isn't hosting their files.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#224

Post by XCSme »

markdown wrote: post #223
XCSme wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that most 3rd party providers say "DON'T HOST THIS FILE LOCALLY AS IT WILL BREAK WHEN WE MAKE UPDATES".

Which of course makes no sense. Why would any action they take have anything to do with a website that isn't hosting their files.

Well, if the JS is to connect to an end-point on their server (eg. Google Analytics) if they remove/deprecate the old API the JS file won't work anymore as it might not be compatible with the new API, so the JS file would have to be updated.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#225

Post by necovek »

jerrac wrote: post #138

So, first, congrats on launching your product. :) Personally, I don't have a need for it, and if I did, I'd be very reluctant to use a proprietary service, but I'm sure there are companies out there who will be happy to use you. Good luck! ------------ That said, maybe the HN community can answer something I've wondered about... Why isn't there an Open Source, standardized, self-hosted, version of this kind of servic…

Canonical Identity Provider (https://launchpad.net/canonical-identity-provider) behind Ubuntu SSO is free software, but the documentation is lacking (it's an openid provider with oauth support for application tokens; not sure if it's been moved to openid connect). To get proper users and groups, you'd needed to extract Launchpad Registry from Launchpad itself (https://launchpad.net/launchpad), though I think some "teams" functionality was added to Identity Provider itself.

In general, if more sites grew proper OpenID auth vs justa subset of providers, we'd see more people run their own OpenID servers to authenticate against external services.

Basically, for an open source/free software service to succeed in this area, it needs to allow both federated and SaaS model because that's how free software people are :) And federated is hard because nobody accepts pure OpenID anymore (and it's funny: you'll trust an email address but not a URL as a unique identifier). But it's probably how hard it was to get working that's the issue.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#226

Post by jerrac »

jerrac wrote: post #138

So, first, congrats on launching your product. :) Personally, I don't have a need for it, and if I did, I'd be very reluctant to use a proprietary service, but I'm sure there are companies out there who will be happy to use you. Good luck! ------------ That said, maybe the HN community can answer something I've wondered about... Why isn't there an Open Source, standardized, self-hosted, version of this kind of servic…

Thanks for all the replies. Sorry I'm a bit late responding.

So, there are options, some I now remember hearing of before.

I'm still interested in more of you thoughts on why they don't have a wider adoption rate.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#227

Post by emj »

alkonaut wrote: post #197
emj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question becomes; where is your company incorporated, where are your servers located. I was looking around on your website and it's very light on such details.

Does that matter really? For GDPR it's he users' location, no?

Some buisnesses, but mostly government, can not put their data on cloud services of companies that operate under laws like the US Cloud Act and similar things.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#228

Post by markdown »

XCSme wrote: post #224
markdown wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of course makes no sense. Why would any action they take have anything to do with a website that isn't hosting their files.

Well, if the JS is to connect to an end-point on their server (eg. Google Analytics) if they remove/deprecate the old API the JS file won't work anymore as it might not be compatible with the new API, so the JS file would have to be updated.

Oh sure! I guess we're talking about different things. In your example, Google is providing you a service, and they're serving the file.

I was talking about using 3rd party file hosting services like cdnjs.com and unpkg.com

It's gotten so bizarre that highly popular libs (even Facebook's React!!! )will recommend you hotlink these third party sites rather than give you a zip file to download and host yourself.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#229

Post by XCSme »

markdown wrote: post #228
XCSme wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the JS is to connect to an end-point on their server (eg. Google Analytics) if they remove/deprecate the old API the JS file won't work anymore as it might not be compatible with the new API, so the JS file would have to be updated.

Oh sure! I guess we're talking about different things. In your example, Google is providing you a service, and they're serving the file. I was talking about using 3rd party file hosting services like cdnjs.com and unpkg.com It's gotten so bizarre that highly popular libs (even Facebook's React!!! )will recommend you hotlink these third party sites rather than give you a zip file to download and host yourself.

Oh yeah, that use case is weird, and as another comment mentioned it no longer brings the benefit of caching.

Re: Show HN: Clerk – all of user management as-a-service, not just authentication

#230

Post by afrodc_ »

thingsgoup wrote: post #176
SahAssar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is authR another way to say authZ? I've never heard of authR and a quick google seems to mostly show a cloudflare project and stuff related to the term "author".

I took it to mean authz. Never seen authR before either.

It seems to be the new way to say it. I've known both as AuthN and AuthZ but AuthR picked up for some reason or another.

In the same vein, it seems like a lot of people aren't too aware of the "identity" space so there's a whole lot of re-inventing the wheel with external sources not realizing something already exists.

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