Managing authorization at scale poses a challenge that grows as businesses and platforms expand. Controlling access to resources across intricate infrastructures requires well-defined strategies to maintain security and boost productivity.
With the growth of cloud-native systems, multi-tenant SaaS, and distributed architectures, tools like Cerbos Hub have become essential to managing authorization policies. In a recent interview, the company’s CPO and Co-founder, Alex Olivier, discussed the launch of Cerbos Hub. Let’s find more about how Cerbos Hub helps businesses manage authorization policies at scale.Â
In this blog post, we’ll examine the best practices for managing authorization policies at scale based on the key features and benefits of Cerbos Hub.Â
1. Externalize authorization logic
A top strategy for handling authorization policies at scale involves separating authorization from your app’s main code. By externalizing authorization logic, you can control access policies from one place. Platforms like Cerbos Hub offer a policy decision point (PDP), allowing your system to make decisions in real-time without putting complex access logic in the app.
This method helps keep codebases cleaner and influences quick policy changes without needing to redeploy services. This becomes crucial as your infrastructure grows. Externalizing also supports setups with multiple services where different parts rely on the same authorization rules.
2. Adopt context-aware permissions
Companies often outgrow role-based access control (RBAC) models as they expand. On a larger scale, a fine-grained access control model is necessary. Cerbos Hub offers this through an attribute-based access control (ABAC) system, where permissions are based on user attributes, environment context, and resource sensitivity.
Detailed, situation-specific permissions allow for more flexible and dynamic control. This ensures users can access what they need based on the situation. This adaptability is essential for multi-tenant setups, ensuring each tenant’s security requirements are met without giving too many permissions.
3. Leverage policy collaboration
Authorization policies must change as fast as your development and operational processes. To handle policies well at a large scale, you need to combine team-based policy editing with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).
With CI/CD, your teams can collaborate in real-time, ensuring that policy changes are reviewed and agreed upon by multiple stakeholders. Teams can also push policy changes from the Web IDE to GitHub repositories. This uses GitOps to automate policy deployment. By integrating with CI/CD pipelines, teams can iterate, validate, and deploy authorization policies without slowing development. For more on how CI/CD pipelines enhance authorization management, read our previous article on authorization in the CI/CD Pipeline.
4. Ensure comprehensive policy testing
Testing plays a key role in handling complex authorization policies at scale. Before rolling out new policies across your setup, ensure they go through full testing in staging environments. Cerbos Hub has built policy testing tools into the CI/CD pipeline. This lets developers validate policies with real-world cases before they go live. This test-first method ensures policies don’t break services or allow access mistakenly. Cerbos Hub has a policy sandbox where developers can create, check, and test policies before they push them to live systems.
5. Use policy orchestration for synchronized rollouts
Managing numerous Policy Decision Points (PDPs) in a large-scale system requires smooth coordination to prevent inconsistencies. Cerbos Hub’s policy orchestration feature ensures that policy rollouts are synchronized across all connected PDPs, keeping every instance up-to-date with the latest policies.
This feature is vital for maintaining tight security across distributed environments, where services and instances may span different cloud regions or edge locations. A central policy coordination system minimizes the risk of out-of-sync policies that could lead to unauthorized access.
6. Monitor authorization decisions in real-time
As systems grow, monitoring authorization decisions becomes essential to maintaining control and ensuring compliance. Understanding how and why specific permission decisions are made is crucial. Cerbos Hub provides real-time monitoring of decision points, displaying the policies in use, logs from each instance, and metrics on decision-making.
This real-time monitoring also contributes to the comprehensive audit trail, recording every permission decision, including the policy version used. This level of insight is vital for compliance in regulated industries requiring strict audit controls.
7. Optimize for performance with local execution
Large environments often need to make rapid authorization decisions. This is especially important for microservices or edge devices. Cerbos Hub allows you to run permission rules locally, reducing the need for external network calls. By pre-compiling rules for edge devices and front-end systems, Cerbos Hub ensures fast and efficient decision-making, even in distributed setups where delays are critical.
8. Enable scalability with stateless PDPs
As you scale, it’s important that your permission management can handle increased load without compromising performance. Stateless PDPs, like those offered by Cerbos Hub, are designed to scale horizontally. They don’t store data between requests, allowing you to add more PDPs as your system expands easily.
This design also ensures resilience—if one PDP fails, others can continue functioning, maintaining uninterrupted access control.
What next?
Scaling authorization policies requires a flexible and high-performing solution. Cerbos Hub supports this need with detailed control, policy coordination, and real-time tracking. By externalizing authorization logic, collaborating on policy creation, and integrating with CI/CD pipelines, Cerbos Hub helps manage complex authorization needs effectively.
Listen to this recent interview where Alex Olivier, CPO and Co-founder of Cerbos talked in details about several key aspects of how Cerbos Hub enhances authorization policy.