kuma VS warrant

https://github.com/kumahq/kuma is an CNCF OSS service mesh for Kubernetes and VMs. We're a control plane on top of Envoy proxy. Very actively developed project, some big adopters in the community, and we've just refreshed all of our Good First Issues.

And not just "Kuma" : https://github.com/kumahq/kuma

Another important change to make is that when you create the cluster, change the Nodes in the "Default pool" to use the COS (not COS_CONTAINERD) image type. There are some underlying issues when using Kuma with GKE, as noted in this GitHub issue, and this is the currently recommended workaround. Otherwise, you will hit pod initializing issues that affect certificate provisioning.

Taking things to a broader level, Kuma is another platform agnostic-OSS solution for service mesh and microservice management – with control plane support of Kubernetes, virtual machines (VM), and even bare-metal environments. Kuma was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) by Kong and still actively contributes to the evolving code base.

Kuma Kuma, from Kong, prides itself on being a usable service mesh alternative. Kuma is a platform-agnostic control plane built on Envoy. Kuma provides networking features to secure, observe, route, and enhance connectivity between services. Kuma supports Kubernetes in addition to virtual machines.

Warrant — Hosted enterprise-grade authorization and access control service for your apps. The free tier includes 1 million monthly API requests and 1,000 authz rules.

The specific challenge with authz in the app layer is that different apps can have different access models with varying complexity, especially the more granular you get (e.g. implementing fine grained access to specific objects/resources - like Google Docs).

Personally, I think a rebac (relationship/graph based) approach works best for apps because permissions in applications are mostly relational and/or hierarchical (levels of groups). There are authz systems out there such as Warrant https://warrant.dev/ (I'm a founder) in which you can define a custom access model as a schema and enforce it in your app.

Let's use warrant.dev as an example. The system provides a set of REST APIs for you to define object types and access policies (called warrants). The general process is first to create object types using HTTP POST:

https://warrant.dev/ (Provider) Relatively new authZ provider, they have a dashboard where you can manage your rules in a central location and then use them from multiple languages via their SDKs, even on the client to perform UI checks. Rules can also be managed programmatically via SDK.

I would describe this debate more as Policy-as-Data (Zanzibar) vs Policy-as-Code (OPA et al).

In Zanzibar, all of the information required to make an authorization decision (namespaces, relationship tuples, etc.) is stored in Zanzibar, and the decision engine resolves access checks based on this data. This data can be scaled horizontally (and consistently) as needed for an application’s needs. This makes Zanzibar a centralized, unified solution for all of an application’s authorization needs. I’ve found this approach more purpose built / well suited for application authorization.

With OPA and other policy engines, the data required for performing access checks lives somewhere else (maybe the application’s database) and must be separately queried and included as part of the authorization check because OPA et al. are stateless decision engines. This makes it such that you need to piece together data from different sources in order to get your final decision, which IMO is something most developers don’t want to deal with.

On the flip side, Zanzibar’s “namespaces” are a very simple policy layer not well suited to querying against data outside of Zanzibar’s scope (e.g. geolocation, time, etc). For scenarios like this, a full fledged policy-as-code solution is great. However, it should be noted that some open source Zanzibar implementations like Warrant[1] and SpiceDB[2] (mentioned in the article) also offer a policy-as-code layer on top of Zanzibar’s graph-based/ReBAC approach to tackle these scenarios.

Disclaimer, I’m one of the founders of Warrant.

[1] https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant

[2] https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

Hey HN, I recently shared my thoughts on why Google Zanzibar is a great solution for implementing authorization[1] and why we decided to build Warrant’s core authz service using key concepts from the Zanzibar paper. As I mentioned in the post, we recently open sourced the authz service powering our managed cloud service, Warrant Cloud[2], so I thought I’d share it with everyone here. Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470943

[2] https://warrant.dev/

More than two years after choosing to build Warrant atop Zanzibar’s core principles, we’re extremely happy with our decision. Doing so gave us a solid technical foundation on which to tackle the various complex authorization challenges companies face today. As we continue to encounter new scenarios and use cases, we’ll keep iterating on Warrant to ensure it’s the most capable authorization service. To share what we learn and what we build with the developer community, we recently open-sourced the core authorization engine that powers our fully managed authorization platform, Warrant Cloud. If you’re interested in authorization (or Zanzibar), check it out and give it a star!