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While there often are built in modules for lots of platforms, it often becomes not so easy out of the box when a platform scales. Adding login to RoR is easy, b

While there often are built in modules for lots of platforms, it often becomes not so easy out of the box when a platform scales. Adding login to RoR is easy, but what if there suddenly is a wordpress site serving the articles, some java backend services handling other aspects etc. Or just generally lots of services that are separate. Then one suddenly needs a central authority not built in to any one service. Then I've seen lots of people offload that to Auth0 or other managed services.

moooo99 6y ago
That would be an ideal scenario for a SSO system. There are open source solutions like Keycloak, IdentityServer etc. While they are nice thanks to the functionality they offer, I recently tried Keycloak and found it extremely annoying to maintain thanks to the not great documentation. Managed services like Auth0 are a great alternative, although Auth0 is one of the more expensive ones. For small apps I found Firebase Auth to be great, for larger projects things like Amazon Cognito or Azure AD B2C are probably the better choice (although Azure AD B2C still doesn't support custom domains). They are worth a try imho, since Amazon as well as Microsoft offer a generous free teir (50k MAUs for free)
techdragon 6y ago
As an Auth0 user, I agree it’s not hard to setup user logins for most frameworks. The reason I’m using Auth0 boils down to business reasons not technical ones. - If I cant make enough money per user to even pay for Auth0, why am I working on this? - Auth0 provides more than login, its got logic related to token re-validation, signup pipelines, social platform integration, etc... sure, I could build each of these as I needed them, in fact I did previously build them for myself. However by using Auth0 I know in advance that all this kind of functionality will be available when/if I need it. - Easy cross system auth. If I want to build something using separate services, like a front end in one tech stack and a backend/admin using a completely different stack, Auth0 makes it so easy to share logins, roles, and permissions between the two systems without having to work out how to handle it myself, or within having to run my own third system like my own installation of Keycloak or building my own equivalent to it.

moooo99 6y ago

That would be an ideal scenario for a SSO system. There are open source solutions like Keycloak, IdentityServer etc. While they are nice thanks to the functionality they offer, I recently tried Keycloak and found it extremely annoying to maintain thanks to the not great documentation. Managed services like Auth0 are a great alternative, although Auth0 is one of the more expensive ones. For small apps I found Firebase Auth to be great, for larger projects things like Amazon Cognito or Azure AD B2C are probably the better choice (although Azure AD B2C still doesn't support custom domains). They are worth a try imho, since Amazon as well as Microsoft offer a generous free teir (50k MAUs for free)

techdragon 6y ago

As an Auth0 user, I agree it’s not hard to setup user logins for most frameworks. The reason I’m using Auth0 boils down to business reasons not technical ones. - If I cant make enough money per user to even pay for Auth0, why am I working on this? - Auth0 provides more than login, its got logic related to token re-validation, signup pipelines, social platform integration, etc... sure, I could build each of these as I needed them, in fact I did previously build them for myself. However by using Auth0 I know in advance that all this kind of functionality will be available when/if I need it. - Easy cross system auth. If I want to build something using separate services, like a front end in one tech stack and a backend/admin using a completely different stack, Auth0 makes it so easy to share logins, roles, and permissions between the two systems without having to work out how to handle it myself, or within having to run my own third system like my own installation of Keycloak or building my own equivalent to it.