21 posts tagged with "open source"

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

We’ve already seen high-profile migrations away from microservices (for example Amazon, Uber, and Google), and just recently The Pragmatic Engineer shared how teams at some companies have suffered in the wake of mass layoffs, as there simply aren’t enough staff to operate the thousands of services built by what used to be much larger engineering organizations. The tide has turned against microservices.

We’re happy to see a shift away from architecture inspired by buzzwords. In many cases (especially if you’re a small startup), you really don’t need microservices, you just need well-demarcated code. There are some good use cases for microservices however—when they address a genuine technical challenge—and this article is about one of them.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Since November 2022, authentik has gone from an open source project with one maintainer writing most of the code (me), to having a real business built on top of it—with six full-time team members across the globe. We celebrated the company’s first birthday last year, but I wanted to share some personal reflections from my own journey from maintainer to CTO.

What’s worked​

Standardizing and templatizing (on some things)​

One of the advantages of a greenfield environment is being able to choose my own constellation of tools and workflows to make things as easy and efficient as possible.

You might think that standardizing of any sort is the remit of scale-ups and big corporations with compliance requirements, but the business efficiency and simplicity that comes with it is also a huge bonus for lean startups.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

In January of 2024, a well-known open-source maintainer wrote the following message to a contributor: “You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”

If you’ve been in open source long enough, you might recognize the tone of Linus Torvalds, creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. Torvalds’ sometimes cruel messages aren’t rare (there’s a whole subreddit for these rants, after all). But in this case, the target – Google engineer Steven Rostedtstands – stands out.

If we put aside the substance of the disagreement, we can acknowledge that the tone can be intimidating – not so much to Rostedtstands, who can likely handle himself, but to onlookers who are curious about contributing. Not all of open source is like this, of course, but enough of it is like this (or close to this) that exchanges like these can make contributing to open source scarier than it needs to be.

How can a brand new contributor, much less a Google engineer, feel brave enough to contribute?

The initial temptation, for me and probably many open-source fans, is to tell new contributors it’ll all be fine. There are bad parts, we might say, but there are good parts, too. But this approach risks invalidating their fears.

In this article, I’m going to lay out five real reasons why contributing to open source can be scary for new contributors. Alongside those reasons, though, I’m going to provide five practical ways to face the fears and contribute anyway.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Hello world! I'm excited to be joining Authentik Security as CEO. I wanted to take this opportunity to share the experience of my first week with the community and a bit about my background.

At the start of my very first "official" day on the job, I got an overview of the various applications we use from Jens, our founder and CTO. If you have ever been through a company onboarding process, you know that it might take a few days up to a couple weeks to get access to everything, sometimes even longer. In a small and agile startup, that might be as little as a day if you're lucky.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

We are happy to announce that 2024 is starting off great, with our first release of the year chock full of new features. Take a look at the new features and functionality included in the release, check out the Release Notes for more details and upgrade instructions, and enjoy the new features!

We confess we are possibly the most excited about this release than any in a while, with some new Admin-level capabilities, enhanced functionality for developers (our DX game is heating up!), and some great UX/usability and customization enhancements.

Let’s start with some of the big features, the ones that kept us busy over the holidays and into the new year.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

In 2024, Tom Scott and Jynn Nelson, otherwise different people in different worlds, faced very similar problems.

• Tom Scott is a YouTuber who, as of this writing, has gotten nearly 2 billion views across over 700 videos. Nearly 6.5 million people subscribe to Tom Scott’s YouTube channel.
• Jynn Nelson, a senior engineer, is a major maintainer of Rust, an open-source project that 2023 StackOverflow research showed was the most admired language among developers. About 2.2 million people are Rust developers.

In a goodbye video, Scott announced an extended break from his channel, saying, "I am so tired. There's nothing in my life right now except work.”

In a post called the rust project has a burnout problem, Nelson wrote, articulating sentiments across the Rust community, “you want a break, but you have a voice in the back of your head: ‘the project would be worse without you.’”

It’s unfortunate that this comparison makes the best opening to the point of this post: open source developers are much more like content creators than most people tend to assume.

If anything, when you look at the history of the Internet and the history of distributing content online, open source developers might be the original content creators.

By looking at the paths they have both paved and recontextualizing their work within a broader view of the creator economy, we can come to a better understanding of the shared futures of content creators and open source developers.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

As a young security company, we’ve been working on our implementation of SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), which I’ll share more about below. SCIM is in many ways a great improvement on LDAP, but we’ve run into challenges in implementation and some things just seem to be harder than they need to be. Is it just us?

authentik is a unified identity platform that helps with all of your authentication needs, replacing Okta, Active Directory, Auth0, and more. Building on the open-source project, Authentik Security Inc is a public benefit company that provides additional features and dedicated support.

We have provided M2M communication in authentik for the past year, and in this blog we want to share some more information about how it works in authentik, and take a look at three use cases.

What is M2M?​

Broadly speaking, M2M communication is the process by which machines (devices, laptops, servers, smart appliances, or more precisely the client interface of any thing that can be digitally communicated with) exchange data. Machine-to-machine communication is an important component of IoT, the Internet of Things; M2M is how all of the “things” communicate. So M2M is more about the communication between the devices, while IoT is the larger, more complex, overarching technology.

Interestingly, M2M is also implemented as a communication process between business systems, such as banking services, or payroll workflows. One of the first fields to heavily utilize M2M is the oil and gas industry; everything from monitoring the production (volume, pressure, etc.) of gas wells, to tracking fleets of trucks and sea vessels, to the health of pipelines can be done using M2M communication.

Financial systems, analytics, really any work that involves multi-machine data processing, can be optimized using M2M.

“Machine to machine systems are the key to reliable data processing with near to zero errors” (source)

Where there is communication in software systems, there is both authentication and authorization. The basic definition of the terms is that authentication is about assessing and verifying WHO (the person, device, thing) is involved, while authorization is about what access rights that person or device has. So we choose to use the phrase “machine-to-machine communication” in order to capture both of those important aspects.

Or we could use fun terms like AuthN (authentication) and AuthZ (authorization).

So in some ways you can think of M2M as being like an internal API, with data (tokens and keys and certs and all thing access-related) being passed back and forth, but specifically for authentication and authorization processes.

authentik is an open source Identity Provider that unifies your identity needs into a single platform, replacing Okta, Active Directory, and auth0. Authentik Security is a public benefit company building on top of the open source project.

Legacy security vendors that rely on black box development can't keep up with open source. It's an oft-discussed topic—the ability of open source communities to quickly jump in and collectively solve problems and innovate solutions—but it is equally believed that "serious" security software companies have proprietary software.

In this blog, we will take a closer look at the pros and cons of the various source availability types of SSO and other security software.

📣 We are happy to announce that the first authentik Enterprise release is here! 🎉

The Enterprise release of authentik provides all of the functionality that we have spent years building in our open source product, plus dedicated support and account management. This Enterprise version is available in Preview mode in our latest release, 2023.8.

This is an exciting step for us, as we grow the team and the company and our user base. We officially became a company just last fall (I wrote about it in November 2022, in “The next step for authentik"), and this release is another move forwards in maturing authentik into the SSO and identity management app of choice.

One thing we want to acknowledge, up front, is that we would never have been able to achieve this goal without the years of support from our open source community. You all helped build authentik into what it is today, and that’s why all of our Enterprise-level features will be open core and source available, always.