Introduction to Okta Fine Grained Authorization (FGA)
Okta FGA is a scalable authorization service for developers that allows implementing authorization for any kind of application and smoothly evolve as complexity increases over time
Inspired by Google’s Zanzibar, Google’s internal authorization system, Okta FGA relies on Relationship-Based Access Control, which allows developers to easily implement Role-Based Access Control and provides additional capabilities to implement Attribute-Based Access Control. You can learn more about different authorization concepts here.
Okta FGA is based on OpenFGA, an open-source project owned by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for which Okta is a core maintainer.
Benefits
Okta FGA provides developers the following benefits:
- Move authorization logic outside of application code, making it easier to write, change and audit
- Increase velocity by standardizing on a single authorization solution.
- Centralize authorization decisions and audit logs making it simpler to comply with security and compliance requirements
- Help their products to ship faster by allowing to easily evolve authorization policies
- A highly available and scalable solution that is deployed in two AWS regions for each jurisdiction (US, Europe, Australia) with active-active replication.
Features
Okta FGA helps developers achieve those benefits with these features:
- The Okta FGA Dashboard, to learn how to use Okta FGA and collaborate with colleagues using SSO.
- Support for multiple stores that allow authorization management in different environments (prod/testing/dev), use cases (internal apps, external apps, infrastructure).
- Support for ABAC scenarios with Contextual Tuples and Conditional Relationship Tuples.
- An HTTP API.
- SDKs for Java, .NET, Javascript, Go, and Python.
- A Command Line Interface tool for managing Okta FGA environments, test models, import/export models, and data.
- Github Actions for testing and deploying models
- A Visual Studio Code Extension with syntax highlighting and validation of FGA models and tests.
Free tier
You can use Okta FGA for free for evaluation purposes or purchase a subscription for production usage.