2023 Year in Review
At Warrant, we're building authorization and access control infrastructure for developers.
Our mission is to provide developers with everything they need to quickly add enterprise-grade authorization and access control (roles and permissions, ABAC, fine-grained, pricing tiers and feature entitlements) into their applications, so they can focus on building their core products.
As a fast moving startup, our focus is often on 'now' and 'what's next', and less so on what 'was'. However, with only a few days left until 2024, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on an action-packed 2023 and all that our team accomplished this year.
Highlights
2023 brought record usage, a host of new features and functionality, as well as some massive platform upgrades, all accelerating us towards our mission of becoming the defacto authorization platform.
- Warrant saw a massive 40x increase in daily API calls, stemming from a 5x increase in companies using the platform in production.
- Despite the additional usage, the team worked hard to drop p50 server latencies to 3ms and keep p99 latencies under 150ms.
- Our small but mighty team shipped 877 PRs (!) across our 20+ repositories (cloud, SDKs, edge etc.) culminating in 128 releases of Warrant Cloud.
- We also shared 6 product updates throughout the year and held our first ever launch week.
- We open sourced and shared the core Warrant authorization engine (based on Google Zanzibar) with the broader developer community, amassing 900+ stars and 20+ forks, as well as 80+ releases including a production-ready v1.0.
Shipping fast and frequently
Whether it was a roadmap feature or customer request, we shipped fast, and often. Some of the highlight releases from the year:
- New v2 API endpoints with batch support, better pagination and performance upgrades.
- Query API and Warrant Query Language (WQL) - a first of its kind query language and API for Warrant's ReBAC permissions engine.
- Added attribute based access control (ABAC) support via policies & context.
- SDK updates - added support for v2 endpoints, better error handling, and simpler models.
- A new GitOps flow to manage and test object types schemas.
- Object type starter templates to enable easy, quick, single command setup.
Scaling from thousands to millions of API calls
Aside from shipping new features and functionality, the team spent a ton of time scaling the Warrant backend to handle the increase in traffic.
We implemented and introduced Warrant Tokens, user-specified consistency tokens (internally dubbed 'wookies') based on Zanzibar's zookies. These tokens enable extensive server-side caching, greatly improving performance and throughput while letting users select their desired consistency on a per request basis.
We also spun up Warrant clusters in additional US regions close to our customers, significantly dropping network latencies and improving overall performance and availability.
Most importantly, we did all of this in-place within a living, breathing production system, all without adverse impact to our customers.
Building awareness and engaging with the community
In 2023, the team also spent time engaging with the larger developer community and sharing our approach to authorization.
We open sourced the core Warrant authorization engine (ReBAC, Zanzibar-inspired) and shared more about why we chose to build Warrant based on Google Zanzibar (this post generated extensive discussion on HackerNews).
The team also had a blast sponsoring and attending the Open Source Summit in Vancouver, chatting about authorization and access control with developers representing hundreds of organizations from around the world.
The team manning our booth at OSS Vancouver
Looking ahead to 2024
2023 was a banner year for Warrant and our team is even more excited for what's coming up in 2024.
Aside from continuing to scale the platform (hopefully to billions of API requests), we're going to continue improving the developer experience and addressing many of the 'rough corners' in the platform, from tooling and SDKs, to the admin dashboard, and embeddable UI components.
Keep an eye out for more launch weeks and product updates to stay up to date on new features and functionality.
Lastly, a big thank you to all of our customers who have entrusted us with their authorization, and to everyone else that provided feedback and suggestions to help us improve Warrant this year. We're excited to continue partnering with you all in 2024!
