Articles about authorization, and other news from Oso's engineering team
Learn why sub-10ms authorization is the new gold standard for enterprise apps. Discover how Oso delivers lightning-fast, scalable permission checks without compromising on flexibility or control.
Discover "A Tour of Polar," Oso’s interactive, point-and-click guide to building authorization policies. Learn RBAC, ReBAC, and ABAC with editable policies and real-time authorization decisions in a fun, hands-on experience.
Learn how to simplify and scale your authorization tests in Oso Cloud using assert variables and the iff operator. Write fewer test cases, validate multiple permissions at once, and ensure your access control policies stay correct as they grow.
Learn how Oso Cloud enables fine-grained access control in microservices using RBAC, ReBAC, ABAC, and Polar—our purpose-built policy language.
Oso Sync ensures your authorization data stays consistent between your app and Oso Cloud by detecting and fixing data drift caused by issues like latency or manual changes. It supports PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and CSVs for other databases, offering both reporting and automatic updates.
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!
Use Oso Cloud, OpenAI, and Supabase to build a permissions-aware RAG chatbot, so users only see context from documents they have permission to view.
Join our upcoming O’Reilly SuperStream: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in Production.
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.
List filtering is the process of retrieving only the data a user is authorized to access, rather than fetching everything and filtering in-memory. In an LLM chatbot, this means ensuring users only see responses or documents they have permission for. Instead of checking authorization for each item one by one, which is slow at scale, Oso Cloud provides two efficient methods: centralized filtering, where the chatbot queries Oso Cloud for a list of authorized item IDs before retrieving them from the database, and local filtering, where Oso Cloud generates a database filter to apply directly in SQL, reducing unnecessary data transfers.
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?
Oso’s team offsite at Hemlock Neversink was all about bonding, strategy, and fun—goat hikes, team workshops, and even casino lessons in access control. We returned recharged, motivated, and stronger than ever. Want to join us next time? We’re hiring!
List filtering is the process of retrieving only the data a user is authorized to access, rather than fetching everything and filtering in-memory. In an LLM chatbot, this means ensuring users only see responses or documents they have permission for. Instead of checking authorization for each item one by one, which is slow at scale, Oso Cloud provides two efficient methods: centralized filtering, where the chatbot queries Oso Cloud for a list of authorized item IDs before retrieving them from the database, and local filtering, where Oso Cloud generates a database filter to apply directly in SQL, reducing unnecessary data transfers.
We just led a webinar on Fine-Grained Authorization in Python, watch to learn more about whether it is the best approach to secure your application permissions.
Find out the hidden complexities of CRM authorization and learn how to do recursive authorization with Oso
Master resource-specific roles with Oso. Learn scalable permissions like Google Docs, GitHub, and Figma using Polar examples for flexible authorization.
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.
How Oso provides EMR apps with the flexibility they need
The updates to Oso’s Local Authorization in the V2 SDKs make it easier to build flexible authorization workflows.
Fallback ensures your app remains up and operational, even in the case of an unexpected Oso Cloud outage.
We just led a webinar on How Google handles Authorization at scale, watch to learn more about whether it is the best approach to secure your application permissions
ReBAC - especially Google Zanzibar's implementation of it - is the wrong abstraction for authorization.
Simplified fact management and powerful query builder API's - and much more!
Simplified fact management and powerful query builder API's - and much more!
A look into the pros and cons of using TypeScript versus JavaScript, plus some thoughts on why there is so much drama around them lately.