Microservices in Identity and Access Management

Welcome. My name is Martin Kodo. I'm principal Analyst at Ko code. Today. I will talk about microservices in identity and access management. Microservices are not that new concept anymore in software development.

Basically, it's sort of using Lego bricks and constructing what you want to have. And most modern applications follow this concept. Use this concept of microservices. So small services, you can combine the way you need it, where you can add parts, or you can remove parts, et cetera.

Basically, this is a very good approach for doing software development because you then can also exchange to one out brick by a new version. One. This is more bright, more shiny, whatever. So a lot of opportunities here, we also see more and more identity and access management vendors working on moving existing products, either to a microservices, architecture, or creating new offerings in a microservices architecture. And my strong belief is that I'm looking at the architecture often software you are procuring is E I tell you why. So why is it so important?

Not only to look at feature lists, but also to architecture, but at the architecture. And why is it so important to look at dust support microservices, which then are commonly deployed in what is called containers, where you can package one or more microservice into, and then run in a, an execution environment. Why is this so important? So the first thing is if you have something which runs in containers, you can run it virtually everywhere. So containers can run on a public cloud infrastructure, such, such as the ones of AWS or Microsoft Azure and others. It can run in private clouds.

It can run in your own data centers, even theoretically could run on a notebook. So containers, if you a lot of flexibility. And if you don't take this microservice approach, so you have couple of containers, then you even might decide on which container runs where, so you can easily shift to a hybrid model. And that is something which from my perspective, is a big advantage. It gives you flexibility in deployment. Following this architecture model. The second very important aspect is about the ability for an agile deployment.

If the software is not a big monolithic trunk of software, but it's constructed as a set of microservices in Containers, you potentially can add capabilities step by step. So if you want to talk about agile deployment and identity management, then it also requires the right architecture. And that only can be a modern container based microservice based architecture, which allows you down to add capabilities. Third element is a microservice needs to communicate with other microservices. So such as a Lego brick has the connections to other Lego bricks.

Microservice has APIs which can be used by other microservices communication, by the way, it makes it pretty interesting to secure this because you need to secure the APIs. You need to secure the communications, cetera, but that's a different story. So you have these APIs, you have the interfaces you can work against that also means that every customization can rely on a defined set of exposed APIs and communication, communication, customization, additional capabilities are done in separate microservices. You can do them in agile development manner.

So following the DevOps approach, you have the same concept here. So it's easy to do customization well segregated from the tool done, right? You will not end up in this, these scenarios anymore where you want to move to the next release and you feel that all your customizations need to be redone. Cause they use a consist set of APIs and they are well segregated. So they are very clear advantages. And that is why it's so important to look at what is, how is the architecture done of today's modern solutions in identity and access measurement.

By the way, when we look at our key concept of where is identity management heading, which we call identity fabric, then having container based microservice architectures is a prerequisite for a modern identity fabric. So I have the strong belief. This is the way to go. This is also what we see as the trend and nowadays in the market. So look also at the architecture now that only at high level features, because that will give you the flexibility in deployment, in customization and in the way you perceive your project. Thank you for listening to me.