10 posts tagged with "launch"

Today, we're excited to announce that Warrant is officially open source! Check out the repo here.

A quick recap​

We started Warrant in June 2021 with the goal of bringing enterprise-grade access control to all applications. Warrant began as a simple API which developers could integrate into their apps in order to implement and manage role based access control (RBAC). Over time, with feedback from customers, we've iterated considerably on the core platform, evolving it into a complete access control system that supports everything from RBAC to more modern access control paradigms like fine grained access control (FGAC), attribute based access control (ABAC) and relationship based access control (ReBAC).

Our cloud-first and API-first approach has enabled us to build a system that is highly-scalable and performant, to the tune of millions of customer API calls per month. As we look ahead, we want to establish a better community and better practices around application access control, and believe that making Warrant open source is the best path forward.

Maintaining separate environments for development/testing and production is a common practice on most engineering teams as a way to improve team productivity, prevent bugs, and speed up release cycles by giving the team more confidence in the changes being made before they're released to customers. For many teams, this often goes beyond the basic production and test environments that Warrant currently supports, including individual developer environments that allow each developer to work independently with their own, separate set of data. Today, we're excited to introduce custom environments and access control across all environments!

What is it?​

Custom Environments​

Teams can now create their own custom environments in addition to the pre-existing production and test environments. While production and test work for some teams, others need more environments like staging or QA. Some organizations also want to distinguish between development and test environments if they run automated tests. Other customers have even mentioned wanting to keep their data models separate for different internal applications. With custom environments, you can set up your Warrant environments to mirror your development workflow and your applications & their different environments.

Environment Permissions​

Teams can now also limit who has access to each environment. For example, organizations may only want to give a subset of team members access to the production environment, or developers with their own environment might want to limit who has access to it so that their data isn't modified by anyone else. With environment permissions, you can now control who can and can't access your environments in Warrant.

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.

What is it?​

Pricing Tiers​

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.

Feature Flags​

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.

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.

What is it?​

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 UI. Today we're introducing a third way, geared towards power users, especially those that ❤️ automation: a native command-line interface (CLI).

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.

What is it?​

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!

Today, I'm excited to launch our newest feature! 🎉 The Warrant Self Service Dashboard is a prebuilt, Warrant-hosted page where your customers can manage their own roles & permissions (think Stripe Checkout for user roles & permissions). Built on top of our core Authorization API, the Self Service Dashboard is fast, flexible, and easy to setup.

I'm excited to announce that Warrant now has built-in support for Role Based Access Control! 🥳 RBAC is one of the most widely used forms of access control, so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for developers to add robust RBAC to their apps. We also know that access control isn't a "set it and forget it" type of problem. Applications evolve over time, whether it's through new features or other changes, so we've made some major updates to the Warrant Dashboard to make it easier to manage RBAC in a live application.

At Warrant, we're building APIs and infrastructure to help developers add authorization and access control to their apps in less than 20 lines of code. Warrant handles the complexity of managing authorization so engineering teams can focus on building their core products.

Turn your code into this. ​