Painless access control for cloud-native applications
Cerbos helps you super-charge your authorization implementation by writing context-aware access control policies for your application resources. Author access rules using an intuitive YAML configuration language, use your Git-ops infrastructure to test and deploy them and, make simple API requests to the Cerbos PDP to evaluate the policies and make dynamic access decisions.
- Iterate quickly
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Instantly update your access policies without re-compiling or re-deploying your application. Let your product owner tweak access policies on their own while you focus on more interesting work.
- Increase visibility
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The traditional practice of weaving authorization logic into application code effectively obscures the logic and complicates the source code. Documentation is notoriously difficult to keep up-to-date as the system evolves — inevitably requiring a code spelunking session to answer questions or update the documentation. This is often tedious, error-prone and requires valuable developer time. The simple policy-as-configuration approach provided by Cerbos helps even non-developers easily understand the authorization logic of the system. Best of all, it is always guaranteed to be up-to-date.
- Don’t repeat yourself
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In modern microservice environments it is quite common to share some resources between different services developed by different teams (e.g. a bank account in a banking system). These services could even be developed using different programming languages. Cerbos provides a language-agnostic API to share common access control policies between these disparate services — ensuring instant consistency without the need to coordinate development and deployment efforts across many teams.
- Use proven techniques
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Cerbos provides advanced tooling to lint, compile and test policies. Native GitOps support is built in. Use the same development best practices you use day-to-day to develop and deploy authorization logic.
- Comprehensive audit trails
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The textual policy language of Cerbos makes it ideal for storing policies on version control systems. Follow the evolution of access rules through time and pinpoint exactly when changes were made, why, and by whom.
Cerbos Policy Decision Point (PDP) is built for modern, containerised microservice environments with support for both x86-64 and ARM64 architectures, comprehensive observability integrations (metrics, distributed tracing), REST and gRPC endpoints, and native GitOps support (CI tooling, push-to-deploy).
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Author Cerbos policies to define access rules for your resources. Optionally, write unit tests for the policies using the Cerbos DSL.
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Compile the policies and run tests using the Cerbos CLI.
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Follow your standard development process to push the changes to production. (E.g. create pull request, run CI tests, get approval and merge to prod branch)
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Cerbos will automatically pull the latest commits from the production branch and update the policies in place without requiring a restart. Your changes are now rolled out!