Discover how Sensat transformed its authorization system with Oso! Learn how they built fine-grained access control, implemented permission inheritance, and eliminated API code changes—all while streamlining development. Read more!

Duolingo migrated to Oso to simplify authorization and improve developer productivity. Previously, permission changes took hours or even days—now, they take minutes. In this interview, Tom Whittaker, Senior Engineering Manager at Duolingo, shares how Oso helped them focus on core business features instead of workarounds. Watch the full story and explore real-world authorization insights from top engineering teams.

Accordingly, vector databases were positioned to be the next it category of data storage—following previous waves that targeted search (e.g. Elastic), unstructured data (e.g. MongoDB), and analytical data (e.g. ClickHouse). Today, however, it’s unclear if vector databases will remain a standalone category. A vector database is more of a conduit for language models—the models do the heavy-lifting, handling vectorizations (i.e. creating embeddings) and re-ranking. Accordingly, the database depends on these models to carry-out vector search. This raises the question: are vector databases actually an independent category, or is vector search just a need-to-have feature of today’s databases? 

Evan Ziebart, Software Engineer at Duolingo, takes us through their journey from a home-grown solution to moving to Oso and hugely simplifying their process for managing user permissions.

ReBAC - especially Google Zanzibar's implementation of it - is the wrong abstraction for authorization.

Ashwyn Nair, Senior Software Engineer at Sensat, dives into how Oso has helped them create a safe space for their users to have full control over who can access their data.

Peadar Coyle, Founder at AudioStack, dives into how they went from a homegrown authorization framework to using Oso and why it was critical to make this change for a GenAi company where protecting data is mission critical.

Simon Robb, Co-founder/CTO at Packsmith, covers the pain of custom-building authorization and the value of a centralized solution.

Tyson Hoffman, Senior Software Engineer at Lumio shares how authorization started as a low priority for their application and how it’s evolved since then. They can now easily define permissions and help curb unintended access.

How do you know if buying authorization as a service is right for you?

Adam Lee, Lead Software Engineer at Chief, dives into authorizing data access patterns in their microservices architecture at Chief.

Reasons for migrating to Oso's authorization as a service platform including migrating from monolith to microservices, and centralizing and standardizing authorization.

Will Gallego, Engineer at Jelli, Inc. dives into his authorization journey and using Oso Cloud to manage granular access control.

Oso is purpose-built for application authorization. OPA is a general-purpose policy engine. This affects how you use them for authorization.

Oso Bear of the Month is a series of interviews with developers in our community to connect and learn more about their authorization journey. We sat down with Jake Hawkes, Staff Engineer at Sibi, to connect and learn more about their authorization journey.

This is a guest post by Peadar Coyle, the Co-Founder and CTO of Aflorithmic, a generative AI audio company, on how he evolved his company's authorization and permissions system.

Abhishek Parmar, co-creator of Google Zanzibar & Airbnb Himeji, joins Oso as technical advisor.

Wayfair's journey from monolith into microservices and how it subsequently built out distributed authorization using Oso.

Guy Podjarny (Founder & President of Snyk.io) on optimizing developer experience, introducing security to developers, and when to offer a freemium product.

#PermissionsPepTalk. Not enough celebrities have talked about authorization and permissions in the public domain, so today we're bringing the topic to the fore as well. Here's what Alice Cooper, Lisa Loeb, Ghostface Killah, Kenny G, Mike Ditka, and Lena Headey have to say to developers working on permissions...

Lea Kissner (co-designer of Google Zanzibar and Head of Privacy for Twitter) on Zanzibar’s design decisions, user-friendly ways to structure access controls, and when (not) to write your own Zanzibar.

We sat down with Simen A. W. Olsen of Bjerk.io, an expert software consultancy. He's used Oso in three projects now, each very different from the other: Indiv, Tabetalt, and nest.js-oso

Oso's Developer Den interview with Jason Warner (VC at Redpoint Ventures, formerly CTO of GitHub and Head of Engineering at Heroku) on his path to computers, the trickiest technical problems, and programming as a superpower.

Oso's Developer Den series with Josh Ma (former CTO of Benchling and founder of Airplane) on hiring, SaaS businesses, and technical tools.

We sat down to speak with Harley Lang, who’s been working on Intraverbal, a new content creation platform for educators and students. Intraverbal has a novel way of constructing lessons, and both students and teachers use the platform. Harley had been hand-rolling his authorization code, and when it started to get unmanageable, he reached for Oso to simplify his authorization design. Intraverbal is an exciting project, and we at Oso were very interested to see the role the Oso library played in the app!