Changelog
Oso Cloud Changelog
From big launches to bug fixes.
Finding the right authorization log can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But now, with Oso Cloud, you can filter logs based on decision results, rule names, argument types, and ID values.
Trying out new software is hard, so we're making it easier. Every new Oso Cloud user now gets a Demo environment pre-populated with a policy and facts. It's the perfect way to start learning Oso Cloud.
Where do you start with a new authorization system? We've got you covered. Our Workbench now helps you define a starter policy based on your app's unique resource hierarchy and relationships. You'll be ready to integrate Oso Cloud into your app and start authorizing in no time.
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
As the number of developers in your organization touching your authorization configuration grows, it’s important to lock down the production Oso Cloud environment to ensure an accident doesn’t break something (even though you can perform a point-in-time recovery of your environment in seconds).
To ensure you can avoid this risk we’ve added an Admin role with exclusive write access to the production environment, and a Member role with read-only access to production and read-write access to all other environments. If this functionality is important for you, check out the docs for modifying user roles.
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Oso uses small pieces of authorization data called facts to make authorization decisions. Oso infers type information about facts based on how the facts are used in your policy. Your application is responsible for providing these facts to Oso. In order to make it clear what types of facts you can add to Oso Cloud , you can use the new Fact Schema.
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Workbench is made to help you configure your authorization rules without needing to learn Polar. Now you can undo and redo any changes you make and we’ve also added policy tests to the Polar code it generates. Finally, we’ve begun adding inline help to the Workbench experience when you don’t know exactly what to include in your policy.
We’ll continue expanding on this in the coming weeks. Go check out the improvements to Workbench.
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If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
When you’re trying to express something complicated in a new programming language you frequently need to validate that the code you’re writing will do what you want it to do. Well, now you can start writing Polar policies with a test-driven approach, or even configure your CI to reject policies with failing tests using Oso’s policy testing.
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Understanding how to express complex authorization patterns in a new programming language can be challenging. You can read the syntax reference, look at sample policies and use standard libraries, but that requires you to do a bunch of work up front before you’re able to make progress on delivering the application functionality you need.
You can configure a new policy or add access controls for new resources in seconds by using Oso’s Workbench.
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Sometimes you need a role that has some standard permissions everywhere in your application, like an internal superuser who needs to provide technical support. Now you can easily configure that with a Polar Building Block called Global Roles.
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If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Sometimes when you’re authoring policy code it may feel easier to just refer to specific users, groups or other resources. Oso just made that possible by adding support for literals to Polar. Several users have requested this feature in order to add users to a superuser group and to reference a top level resource like the application itself.
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There are many use cases when elevated privileges should not persist indefinitely. For instance, when support needs access to customer data or when users want to provide temporary access to project resources. Oso just made that possible with the addition of two new capabilities.
First, you can now access current unix time in an Oso policy which makes it possible for you to define a time period for access.
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Second, Polar can now perform integer comparisons, which when combined with unix time, can determine if a resource has expired.
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If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Continuing the recovery work completed in October, it’s now possible to recover a point in time snapshot of an environment to a new environment or rollback the current environment in place. It’s also now possible to see details of recent recoveries.
It’s now easier to see what version of the policy you’re working on and when it was last updated in Oso Cloud right in the Policy interface.
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If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
There are a handful of steps required to get an authorization service integrated into an application environment. Once configured and running, there are also a few key data points about the authorization service that are important to have access to after its been configured. With these things in mind the Dashboard page has been redesigned to initially provide reminders of the key milestones required to get the service configured. As the milestones have been achieved they change to display data points important for the function of the authorization service.
Administering a production authorization service requires self-service recovery. During a disaster it can be best to recover an older copy in place, overwriting existing production files. Other situations may require a redirected restore to a different location. Oso Cloud’s new self-service recovery UI supports both of those operations.
It’s very important to ensure your authorization needs are being addressed by Oso. You now have a portal directly in the Oso Cloud UI for you to make enhancement requests, see what other users are asking for, and see what’s upcoming. Please make sure you check it out and provide inputs about how your needs could be better served.
We had a great hackathon in October. The team got together in our Manhattan office to celebrate the general availability of Oso Cloud and to work out some of our inner demons by hackin those thons right up. The team built a bunch of interesting things and we gave out some fantastically silly awards! Mike Cen received the, “Let’s Do The Time Warp Again” award for his hackathon project “Time Warp”. Here’s a brief description of the Time Warp project:
“One of the hardest parts of troubleshooting stateful applications is reproducing the state. In the context of Oso, that means recreating the exact policy and the exact set of facts. The Time Warp feature allows you to run an Explain query at any point in the past. How does it work? It uses the functionality we've been building for Recovery to create a temporary environment for the point in time, and the Explain query runs against that temporary environment.”
Stay tuned for some of these hackathon projects to make their way into the product. If you’d like to find out more about the hackathon projects you can join our community slack and look in the show & tell channel.
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Changes to permissions such as elevating a user’s role can many times turn into a flurry of individual permissions deletions & insertions. In between those operations, the state of the user could become invalid downright nonsensical (for instance where a user can have 0 or 2 roles simultaneously) and developers would need to spend additional time building and testing behavior in these outrageous states.
In order to ensure you don’t have to spend the time building and testing those additional safeguards, and your users don’t have outrageous and downright nonsensical experiences, we introduced an API endpoint allowing you to do bulk deletions + insertions in one atomic transaction.
When users are new to a tool they usually need a little time to acclimate to it. Unfortunately, without guidance, that means they bounce around looking at docs and clicking around in the UI until they think they’ve got it. That can be frustrating and take more time than it should. One of the best ways for new users to get used to something and learn the basics is to have an expert boil it down for them and tell them what they need to know.
Oso engineers have had to do this many times and have learned what new users need to understand when they’re experiencing the product for the first time. So, we finally asked Oso engineer, Vijay Ramamurthy, if he would put that experience in the product as a walkthrough.
In this first version we start with the basics about Oso Cloud, how it works and what you need to know to get started. So when a new user goes through this it’s like having Vijay standing behind them telling them what they’re looking at, what it means, and where to click next.
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Authorization is a critical dependency for applications and it should be treated as such. Each organization has different standards for how they manage and monitor their critical dependencies and it can be a huge amount of work requiring a lot of meetings and additional tooling and a number of other things you probably don’t want to do as much as you want to be building features into your application. At Oso, our business is your authorization service, so we do a lot work behind the scenes to make sure your application always receives fast, secure authorization decisions. In September we did a huge amount of hardening work you won’t see but you will experience.
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Global Oso Cloud UI
Oso Cloud Dashboard
Oso Cloud Policy page
Oso Cloud Facts page
Oso Cloud Logging page
Oso Cloud Settings page
Client SDK’s & API
VSCode extension
Documentation
Deprecated legacy API keys in favor of API keys that can be read-only or read-write
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Use the Query API to ask Oso complex questions
Typical application authorization logic answers a single question: “Can this user do this action on this resource?” Evaluating that question is hardcoded into your application and answering different questions requires writing new code. As the logic changes all these evaluation paths need to be updated.
Oso takes a different approach and lets you declaratively model your authorization logic. This policy and data can then be used to answer multiple questions.
If you have a complicated question like -- "What are all the users that can do this action on this resource?" -- you can ask that question directly using Oso’s Query endpoint.
With Query, you can write a rule to answer any question you have. You can query custom and builtin polar rules in different ways depending on the information you have and the information you want.
Oso has other builtin endpoints for many common questions. Authorize lets you ask if a user can do an action on a resource. List gets you all the resources a user can do that action on. Actions gives you all the actions a user can do on a resource. And you can query the facts you've inserted into Oso Cloud with Get.
You are not limited to these and can ask anything you want with the Query endpoint.
For a full guide on using query read the docs.
Logs of Recent Authorizations
Logging in Oso Cloud is now enabled by default. Up until now, you had to string up your own logging system for debugging authorizations. Now, you can use the Logs page to see debugging information about every authorization request made by your application with 100% coverage.
Logs include all of the query inputs provided by your application as well as the results returned. Replay queries against your current policy and facts in the Explain view and see how rules in your policy contribute to the result.
With this tool, you can quickly identify why a recent request failed (or why it succeeded unexpectedly). The logs also show queries with wildcard arguments if you’re using the new Query API, along with a count of the results returned.
Creating and deleting environments
Environments management is self-serve! We've had support for multiple environments for a couple of months. However, environments, up until this point, were provisioned manually by Oso engineers.
Spinning up additional environments is important for ensuring your application authorization service matches your development or continuous integration workflow. Now, you can create and delete environments when you want them (or not) with self-service environment management right in the Oso console.
Edit your Policy Directly inside the Oso Cloud Dashboard
When using the dashboard to build your first Oso Cloud policy, you used to have to download the policy locally to then upload it into your Oso Cloud environment with oso-cloud policy. When you made changes to your policy, you had to use oso-cloud validate or install our VSCode extension to know if the policy was valid before uploading it.
To make it quicker and easier to get up and running with Oso Cloud, we’ve added a web-based editor so that you can view and modify your policy directly in the Oso Cloud dashboard. As shown in the screenshot below, the editor provides inline error messages as you write, just like our VSCode extension does.
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Read only API Keys
It's common for different parts of your application to need different levels of access to your authorization service. Some services might not need to modify any authorization-relevant data, they'll only need to perform authorize requests. You might also want to grant individuals, rather than applications, access to your authorization data for debugging and would prefer not to have to ask them to “promise to be extra careful not to mess with anything”.
Without a managed authorization service, you might need to then build this logic into your authorization itself, or rely on the security model of the system where you store your authorization-relevant data (usually a database). Both of these solutions can be painful to maintain over time.
With Oso Cloud, you can now solve this by issuing "Read-Only" API keys to apps/services/individuals. A "Read-Only" key can only be used to read facts and authorize actions, but not to write facts or update policies.
Changelog (July - August)
Quickstart & Next Steps
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
New Explain Tool
When you make an authorize request, Oso Cloud tells you if a user can do a certain action on a resource. You get back a true or a false. But what do you do if you don't get the answer you were expecting? It can be hard to debug problems with the policy which is why we've added a new tool to the dashboard.
With the explain tool, you can see exactly why a query succeeded or failed. When a query is evaluated, the policy looks for the existence of certain facts. These could be has_role facts or has_permission facts or any other facts your policy uses. You can also see all the different possible sets of facts that would mean the user is allowed to do the action and which of those were actually found. It's a powerful debugging tool that we have used a lot ourselves and we know that it will help you too.
To get access to the explain tool, get started with Oso Cloud.
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Context Facts
We’ve heard from a lot of folks that authorization sometimes depends on information that is hard to migrate into the Oso Cloud data store. For example:
To address this feedback, we’ve added a new feature to Oso Cloud called “context facts”. Now whenever you ask Oso Cloud an authorization question, you can include contextual information for us to take into consideration when answering the question. Context Facts are available in the CLI and all client libraries: Go, Node, Python, Ruby.
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Tutorial: GitCloud Sample App
To help users understand how to add authorization using Oso Cloud in a real world app composed of multiple services, we created GitCloud, a GitHub/GitLab-like sample application.
For a tutorial on how GitCloud leverages Oso Cloud, see our latest doc on securing a real world app using Oso Cloud. It covers the three main pieces involved in adding authorization: enforcement, modeling, and data management.
Updated Policy Examples
Last, but not least, we've taken a fresh coat of paint to our example policies featured in Modeling Building Blocks and the Policy Builder.
We've expanded the sections covering the "Building Blocks" themselves to give a more conceptual overview of common policy structures. For example, we've described what we mean by Actors and Resources, how to use Roles in a policy, what a Resource Hierarchy is, and how to use generic Attributes.
All of these are reflected in the latest policy builder, making it even easier to get a full policy for your use case, with best practices built-in, in a matter of minutes!
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Changelog (May - July)
Quickstart & Next Steps
If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Docs: How Oso Cloud Works
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We get a lot of questions about how Oso Cloud works, what you can do with it, and how it helps you organize authorization data and logic. To answer these, we put our ideas down in a new doc called How Oso Cloud Works.
Give it a read and get acquainted with our new managed product:
New Facts-Based Approach and APIs
While roles and relationships cover a wide range of authorization use cases, many companies have additional requirements involving some form of attributes. We’ve made it possible to represent attribute-based authorization so now Oso Cloud covers all commonly-seen authorization models:
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The Policy Builder has examples of how to use these patterns in your Oso Cloud policies.
To support such a wide variety of ways to think about authorization, we switched from storingroles and relations to storing more general facts. Read more about facts in How Oso Cloud Works.
In moving to this more general facts-based approach, we will soon be removing the /roles and /relations endpoints in the Oso Cloud HTTP API in favor of the more general /facts endpoint. We recommend updating to the latest versions of the Oso Cloud CLI and client libraries to prepare for this change.
Support for Multiple Environments
We’ve exposed an interface for managing multiple versions of your Oso Cloud policy and data to allow for better development and testing workflows. Just as you might have both a staging and production database, now you can have a staging and production authorization engine.
Each environment in Oso Cloud uses a different API key, which you can access (and reset!) from the web interface. This means that your application code doesn’t need to know what environment it’s accessing, you can just treat your API keys the same way you treat other configuration values that vary across deployments (such as your database handles).
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Additionally, backups can be accessed across environments, which makes it possible to copy data from one environment to another. This can make maintaining dev/prod parity much easier. You can read more here.
Changelog (April - May)
Quickstart & Next Steps
Our team is happy to help you get started with Oso Cloud. If you'd like to try out any of these new features get started here and read the docs here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Oso Cloud is now in public beta. You can use your GitHub login to get access to the Oso Cloud Sandbox, a test environment that supports all the latest features. We’re frequently rolling out new features to the Sandbox, like our recent web and command line interfaces and client library updates (currently in Python, Go, and Node.js). Go to the Oso Cloud Sandbox to get your API key, and run through our quickstart guide to get started. For production access, reach out.
Policy Builder
Many developers start by trying to understand what authorization model they have. All they’ve heard of is “roles” or “attributes.” Oso Cloud’s new Policy Builder gives you more structure than that by giving names to common patterns, like “org charts,” and showing you how to model those patterns in Oso. The Policy Builder is a tool that helps you try out different models that might apply to you and model them using Oso:
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Note: for more detailed documentation on these patterns, you can also read our Authorization Building Blocks guide.
Guide: Add Oso Cloud to your App
Before adopting Oso Cloud, you’ll want to get a feel for what the process of adding it to your app looks like. That’s what this guide on adding Oso Cloud to your app is for — it shows you how to use the Oso Cloud client libraries (Python/Node/Go) to perform authorization checks in your app. The guide walks you through updating authorization data and enforcing authorization decisions in the language of your choice.
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To get started adding Oso Cloud to your app, read the guide.
Oso Cloud Dashboard
We’ve built a new dashboard for Oso Cloud! It now summarizes the data you’ve added (e.g., roles and relations) and also logs for recent authorization requests to your Oso Cloud instance.
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Oso Cloud Audit Logs for Authorization Requests
We recently spoke with an Oso user who said: “Authorization systems are so tricky – they never tell you when they’re working.”
Not anymore :)
Now you can see that Oso Cloud is authorizing (or denying) requests in real time. The Logs page contains all recent authorization logs for authorize and list requests to your Oso Cloud instance. (For the Sandbox, we persist the last 512 logs for you. There’s no limit for production.)
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Changelog (Mar - April)
Quickstart & Next Steps
Oso Cloud is in public beta. You can get started here, and read the docs here. If you’d like to ask questions about how to set up Oso Cloud or authorization more generally, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
Here’s the latest on Oso Cloud:
Visualize Your Authorization Model
One of the hardest problems in authorization is modeling. Should you represent this as a role or a relationship? How do you represent what’s going on in your app as authorization logic? To help you understand your model better, we’re experimenting with a model visualizer.
Today, the visualizer takes your Oso policy and displays it as a graph. For instance, this is what our GitClub application looks in the visualizer:
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The visualizer currently supports resource blocks, which is how you model role-based access control (RBAC) in Oso. If you want to see what the visualizer would look like for your model, set up a 1x1 with the engineer who built it.
Oso Cloud Docs
Oso Cloud docs are live.
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For an Introduction to Oso Cloud, Quickstart, and API docs go to: https://cloud-docs.osohq.com/.
Changelog (Feb-Mar)
Quickstart & Next Steps
Oso Cloud is in closed beta, but we have docs available here. If you’d like to learn more about Oso Cloud or try it out, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
We’ve been thinking about Oso Cloud for 2+ years. Here’s a preview while it’s in closed beta.
What is Oso Cloud
Oso Cloud is a fully-managed authorization service. You use it to provide fine-grained access to resources in your app, to define deep permission hierarchies, and to share access control logic between services in your backend.
As with the open source Oso library, you write policies in our declarative authorization language, Polar, to describe who is allowed to do what in your app, e.g., an admin role at an organization always grants users write access to resources that the organization owns. Oso can then efficiently use those policies to make authorization decisions.
But in contrast to the library, Oso Cloud lives separately from your applications, and stores its own data:
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An Oso Cloud server exposes three APIs:
We provide client libraries to integrate Oso Cloud with your application, as well as a CLI for development and testing.
Changelog (Nov-Feb)
Quickstart & Next Steps
Oso Cloud is in closed beta, but we have a preview Quickstart Guide available here. If you’d like to learn more about Oso Cloud or try it out, set up a 1x1 with our engineering team.
