One thing I find difficult using access control systems as a distributed service like Zanzibar is a convenient and performant way to search and filter resource data using permissions. For example defining database queries that should only return resources a subject has access to based on Zanzibar permissions.
Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
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Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#22I was super curious to hear how Zanzibar is being used to control access to buildings. Don’t be fooled, this is not that post. ;)
I was super curious to hear why the Zanzibar office of Google was somehow better at authorization than e.g. their Mountain View office.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#23I was super curious to hear how Zanzibar is being used to control access to buildings. Don’t be fooled, this is not that post. ;)
Apologies for the confusion! Maybe an interesting idea for us to explore next :P
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#24The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees.
This goes for every part of their stack. As a result, things like Colossus, BigTable, and Spanner effectively act like force multipliers for their engineers, because they provide the guarantees they can't get elsewhere. The fact other people at other random companies can't do that? Not their problem in the slightest, actually.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#25[flagged]
If you genuinely aren't trying to be snarky, then what was the point of this post? You clearly don't even know what Zanzibar is. If you were trying to find out more about it there would be hundreds of more useful questions to ask.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#26One thing I find difficult using access control systems as a distributed service like Zanzibar is a convenient and performant way to search and filter resource data using permissions. For example defining database queries that should only return resources a subject has access to based on Zanzibar permissions.
At Google, I believe some client applications build and maintain "permission-aware" search indexes based on the permissions in Zanzibar. In essence, Zanzibar can be queried to figure out the object ids a particular subject has access to. These object ids can then be hydrated via a database query or separate service call.
At Warrant, we're experimenting with allowing customers to maintain searchable metadata in Warrant and exposing a "query" API[1] that can automatically hydrate objects based on that metadata.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#27I was super curious to hear how Zanzibar is being used to control access to buildings. Don’t be fooled, this is not that post. ;)
I wouldn't be surprised if it is somewhere. Just have the smart card system use Cloud IAM for access control decisions.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#28[flagged]
This tired trope has jumped the shark with this comment. Not only is it off topic, but even if it did refer to an actual Google product, it's disingenuous because its only point was to be snarky.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#29The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?
The fact they did it that way is actually a perfect example of why Google is considered so far ahead of competitors technologically and operationally by their engineers. When you have a powerful building block like Spanner that engineers can use, they then can work on the product instead of wasting time on brittle consistency models, custom storage layers, and providing their own uptime guarantees. This goes for ever…
Ironically, by the time Spanner became generally available, Google had largely lost their appetite for launching new products.
Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization
#30We successfully used a Relationship-based Authorization System based on the Zanzibar paper at my last job building a B2B SaaS leaning heavily on cross-company integration. The flexibility in defining rules through tuples helped us iterate rapidly on new product features. We used self-hosted Ory Keto [0] instances as the implementation, though we would have preferred a managed solution. We were checking out Auth0 Fine…
> though we would have preferred a managed solution
We completely agree here, which is why we initially started out with our managed cloud offering, Warrant Cloud[1]. While Zanzibar is powerful, operating it with solid latency/availability can be quite challenging.