Lots of usability enhancements within the dashboard this month including:
userId or name on the Users page
Lots of exciting updates to share for September! 🍂
Earlier this month, we shipped native support for feature flags & pricing tiers in Warrant. You can now create and manage features and pricing tiers (ex. free, pro, enterprise) for your app directly in the Warrant admin dashboard or via API. Once configured, access to these features and tiers is enforced at runtime in your app using the existing front-end and server-side Warrant SDKs.
Features and tiers are completely dynamic and can easily be changed and overridden as needed. Check out more info in our launch post and if you'd like to get started with Pricing Tiers & Feature Flags, just sign-in to your Warrant account and follow the onboarding guide.
We're excited to launch our official Angular SDK! Similar to our Vue and React SDKs, the Angular SDK ships with components and other primitives to help you implement authz checks in Angular web apps.
We've built Warrant to be easy to integrate with any 3rd party authn provider or home-grown authn solution. One of the more popular authn providers we've seen companies using is Firebase. To make it even easier for Firebase users to start using Warrant, we've created a repo of common cloud/serverless functions that you can deploy to Firebase to get your users hooked up to Warrant in < 10 minutes. The repo has functions to create and delete users and sessions (triggered on Firebase auth events). Check it out here.
Today, we're excited to launch support for Pricing Tiers and Feature Flags!
While our core platform has always supported the ability to implement custom pricing tiers and feature flags, it required a lot of upfront work for teams to implement. We strongly believe these are common problems encountered at every software company so we built native support for pricing tiers and feature flags into Warrant.
Figuring out how to price your SaaS product is a complex enough problem by itself, often requiring several iterations of experimentation to determine. Tiered pricing (or pricing tiers) is a common pattern for SaaS startups to charge customers for their product today. In this approach, a company grants customers access to premium and enterprise level features only if the customer is subscribed to a paid or enterprise plan. This strategy comes with its own set of challenges: What should I include in my free tier? How much should I charge for a pro/premium tier? What features should be considered enterprise features? With Warrant's built-in support for pricing tiers, you can easily limit access to premium features in your product based on each customer's subscription, giving you the flexibility to control which features are available in a pricing tier and match changing customer personas. You also have the ability to grant/revoke access to individual features per user or customer for one-off scenarios.
Software teams looking to iterate quickly and frequently release functionality with reduced risk typically make abundant use of feature flags. Warrant now has built-in support for feature flags, so teams can incrementally release features individually to customers. Common uses for feature flags might be enabling a beta feature for certain users or rolling out a feature only to specific customer segments. When bugs arise, feature flags can be useful for quickly disabling a faulty feature, allowing teams to avoid performing a complete deployment rollback or scrambling to release a fix.
It's hot outside but the team is staying cool and shipping. Here's what we've been up to in the past month:
We launched on Hacker News earlier this month, check out the discussion here.
We've created a new demo app to showcase Warrant running within a live web application - managing roles, permissions and access checks. The demo app lets you preview a sample e-commerce store as different users (with different permissions) and see a live access log of all permissions checks as they happen in the app.
Building and maintaining a role-based access control (RBAC) model at a growing company can be a challenge as your application evolves with continually changing product requirements. As requirements and features are updated, your access model needs to keep up. Today, we're excited to introduce a new concept and features to help you manage your RBAC model with less complexity: implied roles and permissions.
Many RBAC models involve some sort of inheritance, where an admin role may have all the permissions of a lesser role plus more admin-specific permissions. This can involve duplication of permission assignments across roles and quickly turn your roles and permissions into a complex mess that's difficult to manage.
We've eliminated the need for this duplication and made it simpler to manage complex RBAC models via API or Dashboard with the concept of implied roles and permissions. With implied roles and permissions, you can define a role or permission that will automatically be implied when a user is assigned a particular role or permission. For example, a manager and basic role can be implied by the admin role so any user with the admin role will automatically be granted the capabilities of both the manager and basic roles.
The two primary ways to view, manage and enforce an access model in Warrant include APIs and the admin dashboard. Today we're introducing a third way, geared towards power users, especially those that ❤️ automation: a native command-line interface (CLI).
Here's what we've been up to in July:
The Edge Agent is a lightweight Go service that customers can deploy in their own infrastructure which functions as an in-network, local cache capable of responding to access check requests with single millisecond response times. You can read more about Edge here and check out the source code on GitHub.
Today, we're excited to launch the Warrant Edge Agent! It's been a long time in the making, and we're finally ready to share more about it and roll it out to our customers.
As a centralized, stand-alone service, engineering teams have consistently brought up the latency & reliability concerns of performing access checks with Warrant because it means adding a network request to the critical path of almost every request to their applications. While our globally distributed authorization service boasts both low-latency and high availability that meets most customers' demands, some teams have stricter requirements.
Over the past few months, we've had the opportunity to speak with and work closely with engineering teams implementing authorization in their applications with Warrant. A common topic that came up in these conversations was the level of integration between Warrant and our customers' applications.
For example, implementing multi-tenancy with Warrant requires our customers to call the Warrant API each time a tenant or a user is created in their application and whenever a user is added to or removed from a tenant. This is done in order to keep the access rules in Warrant up-to-date as data changes in the customer's application.
We received feedback from teams that adding this logic to their applications can be somewhat redundant and lead to tighter coupling (particularly on the write path) with Warrant. We listened, and in an effort to reduce the friction of initial and ongoing integration with Warrant, we're excited to launch Warrant Sync!
Here's what we've been up to in June:
We’re excited to officially launch Warrant Sync into beta today! Sync connects with your existing database and automatically creates, updates and deletes warrants for common use-cases like managing users, tenants and RBAC. We built Sync to make integrating with Warrant significantly easier and cut down on a lot of the boilerplate API integration. Check out more in our Sync launch post and get in touch if you'd like to try it out.