A microservice application comprises small autonomous services that communicate with each other through application programming interfaces (APIs) — as standalone services or via a service mesh. These API calls or requests raise security and compliance concerns if not appropriately secured through authentication and authorization checks. Service-to-service authorization is the process of determining what actions an authenticated service is allowed to perform based on pre-defined policies.

The microservice architecture involves breaking the application into small interconnected services, each performing a specific task. This breakdown enables developers to work on individual services without affecting the rest of the application, leading to more agility and easier scaling. These services communicate through APIs and, as the number of services within an application increases, developers may introduce a microservice service mesh to control all the service-to-service communication.

As companies increasingly move to microservices, they discover the security challenges they pose. Learn about security in a microservices architecture, and about security best practices to ensure your microservices application is secure.

The many benefits of microservices architecture, such as improved scalability and agility, explain why organizations are migrating from the traditional monolithic architecture. However, these benefits come at the cost of increased complexity, especially regarding security. According to an O’Reilly survey, 56% of respondents considered increased complexity the greatest challenge in developing microservices.

Before the rise of cloud computing and small autonomous services built with containers, a typical application would consist of a monolith of code with a frontend, a backend and a database. Developers would take extra caution when updating their code because any change or bug could affect the entire application. As an alternative, microservices broke down applications into small interconnected services — each responsible for their discrete function, collaborating using APIs.

The shift from monolithic architectures to microservices poses complex authorization challenges to development teams. In this article, we look at how to enforce fine-grained access control in cloud-native environments as we make a case for a dynamic approach to authorization in microservices. Key takeaways.

There are unquestionable advantages to cloud native technologies, but significant challenges as well. Case in point: microservices authorization. Microservices have, for many companies, become the architecture of choice for cloud native apps — whether for migrating legacy apps or building new cloud native applications.

Many organizations build applications using microservices that often communicate with other distributed services. Ensuring that they remain secure requires a “secure token service,” secure communication protocols (mTLS), authentication, authorization, and data encryption.

Styra Academy, our online training portal for free courses on OPA, Rego, and Styra Declarative Authorization Service, has a new course available - Microservice Authorization! Before diving in, let’s get a better understanding of microservices and some of the authorization challenges developers need to consider. Microservices are everywhere — and securing them presents a unique set of challenges.