Identity and access management (IAM)
Any startup that uses AWS automatically understands what IAM is. To quote from the AWS website —
‘AWS Identity & access management provides fine-grained access control across all of AWS. With IAM, you can specify who can access which services and resources, and under which conditions. With IAM policies, you manage permissions to your workforce and systems to ensure least-privilege permissions.’
We open-sourced ‘IAM as a service’ yesterday — Click here to access the Github repo
What is IAM as a service
Authentication and access control (authorization) are core security features for any service that helps you validate —
- Who is using your service
- Do they have permissions to use your service
- What are the exact actions they can take while using your service
We took inspiration from AWS IAM to provide ‘IAM as a service’ right off the bat. You can use our open-source repo and self-host IAM as a micro-service to manage authentication and authorization of your users. You can now provide fine-grained access control to your internal & external services / products / resources quickly without worrying about how to secure your service or product.
Why we built it
Hypto at its core is an engineering led company. While our existing product can be categorized as ‘fin-tech’ due to enabling payments seamlessly, we realized our strength was in converting an unreliable and legacy technology stack (domestic account-account payments in India) into a highly scalable, reliable and developer friendly API product.
Being a B2B API first company, we ended up building many products and features that were not core to the problem we were solving. In an ideal world, we only write code for the problem we are passionate about and we are done. But software does not work that way! There are a substantial number of non-core activities we end up doing to make our solution into a product that is consumable, secure and just works. Just to give examples of a few —
→ Authentication
→ Access control
→ Billing
→ Logging
→ Monitoring
→ Rate limiting to name a few
When the problems we are solving have no relation to the above, we get frustrated by the amount of non-core work we end up doing anyway. We also had conversations with multiple other software companies that felt that they were spending way too much time doing ‘need to do but don’t want to do’ stuff. This was a lightbulb moment for us and we decided to make the lives of other software companies way easier. We want them to be focusing on their problems and what unique insight they bring rather than spend time on building something that is not going to differentiate or move their product forward in any way.
‘Leave the boring stuff to us’ — this is our proposition to software companies
We also understand that every software company is different - while our solution might help for a good number of start-ups and companies, there will be many more who would not find it directly applicable. To solve for that, we are open-sourcing every product and service that we build and also have created an open Slack channel to start a community that fosters solutions to such non-core problems faced by software companies.
Authentication and authorization as a service was taken as an inspiration from AWS IAM since every B2B company, at some point, has to build a solution that grants and manages access to their internal and external features/services. We ourselves had to build a fine grained RBAC (role based access control) for our payments API product.
We decided that IAM was a good starting point for any multi-tenant SaaS company that wants to implement authentication and access control features as a simple to use self-hosted micro service.
Join our Hypto community Slack
Sample use cases for IAM as a service
Multi tenant B2B SaaS
Role management and access control for internal tools
Collaboration & sharing features
Tiered pricing plans with feature access
We look forward to hosting you on our community and hearing your feedback.
