Speaker: Damian Schenkelman, Principal Architect, Auth0
Date: Thursday, June 23, 2022
Location: Denver, CO

Description: In 2019, Google published the Zanzibar paper, which explains how the system that powers authorization for all their products (Drive, Youtube, Cloud, and more) works. Since then, Zanziba-inspired systems have risen in popularity due to their capabilities. Companies like Carta and Airbnb have created their implementations, and open source and SaaS implementations of Zanzibar-inspired systems have surfaced.

Zanzibar has even become an authorization and access control trending topic, but getting started with Zanzibar-inspired implementations can be a daunting task. Understanding the paper and its concepts from scratch can be challenging, and the approach Zanzibar proposes for making authorization decisions is fairly different from both RBAC and ABAC. Additionally, many of the implementation decisions behind Zanzibar are fairly specific to Google and its internal use. All of this poses a challenge for teams looking to implement and get adoption of Zanzibar-inspired systems at companies.

Come to this session to learn what the “Zanzibar approach” is, how it works, when you should use something like it, and how you can get started, either from scratch or starting from an existing PBAC solution.