Authorization is the next big technical challenge

Want to deliver messaging or voice calls for customers? You’ve got Twilio. Need to process credit card payments? Stripe has you covered. Need to run machine learning models or spin up compute resources or transcribe a podcast or hundreds of other services? They’re just an API away through a cloud provider.

But want to grant or deny rights to users in your application? Good luck.

Authorization (along with authentication) is one of the most foundational needs of developers when building their apps, but it’s still a colossal pain to deliver. As Randall Degges wrote in 2017, “[A]lmost every time I sit down to build the authentication and authorization piece of my websites, mobile apps, and API services, I get overwhelmed.” This is just as true in 2021, and not just for Degges.

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