How Netflix Is Solving Authorization Across Their Cloud [I] - Manish Mehta & Torin Sandall, Netflix
Channel: CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation]
Date: 2017-12-15

How Netflix Is Solving Authorization Across Their Cloud [I] - Manish Mehta & Torin Sandall, Netflix

Since 2008, Netflix has been on the cutting edge of cloud-based microservices deployments. In 2017, Netflix is recognized as one of the industry leaders at building and operating “cloud native” systems at scale. Like many organizations, Netflix has unique security requirements for many of their workloads. This variety requires a holistic approach to authorization to address “who can do what” across a range of resources, enforcement points, and execution environments.

In this talk, Manish Mehta (Senior Security Software Engineer at Netflix) and Torin Sandall (Technical Lead of the Open Policy Agent project) will present how Netflix is solving authorization across the stack in cloud native environments. The presentation shows how Netflix enforces authorization decisions at scale across various kinds of resources (e.g., HTTP APIs, gRPC methods, SSH), enforcement points (e.g., microservices, proxies, host-level daemons), and execution environments (e.g., VMs, containers) without introducing unreasonable latency. The presentation includes a deep dive into the architecture of the cloud native authorization system at Netflix as well as how authorization decisions can be offloaded to an open source, general-purpose policy engine (Open Policy Agent).

This talk is targeted at engineers building and operating cloud native systems who are interested in security and authorization. The audience can expect to take away fresh ideas about how to enforce fine-grained authorization policies across stackthe cloud environment.

About Manish Mehta
Manish Mehta is Senior Security Software Engineer at Netflix, Los Gatos, CA. He has designed and developed solutions around secure bootstrapping, authentication (service and user), and authorization for cloud-native infrastructure. His professional interests and expertise are cyber security in general, and specifically in security solutions anchored in cryptography. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Univ. of Missouri - Kansas City and has authored several research and conference publications.

About Torin Sandall
Torin Sandall is the technical lead of the recent open source Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. He has spent 10 years as a software engineer working on large-scale distributed systems projects. Prior to working on the Open Policy Agent project, Torin was a senior software engineer at Cyan Inc. (acquired by Ciena Corp.) where he designed and developed core components of their SDN/NFV platform such as modelling languages as well services for resource orchestration and topology discovery. Torin has recently given talks on policy-related topics in Kubernetes at ContainerDaysPDX and LinuxCon Beijing as well as the Kubernetes Community Meeting and the Kubernetes SF meetup.
Join us for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona May 20 - 23, Shanghai June 24 - 26, and San Diego November 18 - 21!  Learn more at https://kubecon.io. The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.