Microservices are great, but we all know what happens when each delivery team chooses its own tech stack. Platform teams are charged with getting leverage and reuse for “common concerns” across microservices. We already do this successfully for deployment, monitoring, logging, and service mesh. The next logical step is providing a common abstraction for identity and access.

Identity is an obvious one - you need the caller’s identity flowing through the system, and we have mature technology for that - OAuth2 and OIDC. Access is just now getting the attention it deserves.

This talk will focus on the benefits of providing a common authorization layer, based on three principles: fine-grained, policy-based, real-time. We’ll introducefeature Topaz, an open source authorization solution that can be deployed as a sidecar or a microservice in your environment, to provide a common authorization layer for your cloud applications and APIs.

Ronen Hilewicz is a principal software engineer at Aserto, where he combines his passions for software security and clean architecture to help engineers navigate the challenges of modern identity and