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Securing Your Microservices: A Comprehensive Guide

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Better Engineering
Sep 26, 2024
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There are new considerations for managing authentication and authorization in microservice environments. With a monolithic application, it is common to have fine grained roles, or at least role associated groups in a central user repository. With the emphasis on independent lifecycles for microservices, however, this dependency is an anti-pattern. Development of an independent microservice is then constrained by and coupled with updates to the centralized resource.

It is common to have authentication (establishing the user’s identity) performed by a dedicated, centralized service or even an API gateway. This central service can then further delegate user authentication to a third party.

When working with authorization (establishing a user’s authority or permission to access a secured resource), in a microservices environment keep group or role definitions coarse grained in common, cross cutting services. Allow individual services to maintain their own fine grained controls. The guiding principle again is independence. A balance must be found between what can be defined in common authorization service to meet requirements for the application as a whole, and what authorization requirements are implementation details for a particular service.

OAuth 2.0

The OAuth 2.0 authorization framework enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service, either on behalf of a resource owner by orchestrating an approval interaction between the resource owner and the HTTP service, or by allowing the third-party application to obtain access on its own behalf.

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