Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Building Permissions

Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by s09dfhks on Sunday June 25, 2023 @03:38PM (#36471822)

Not trying to be snarky, but what are the chances google kills this off within the next 5 years because some engineer wants a promo and decides it’s taking too much of their time

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by kkajla on Sunday June 25, 2023 @03:43PM (#36471872)

Google doesn't actually offer Zanzibar as a product/service (in GCP or otherwise) to customers. However, they do use it internally to manage permissions across their various products (Google Docs, Drive, YouTube, etc.) and have had a lot of success doing so. Because of that, there are many open source implementations of Zanzibar out there (as others have commented). Warrant also maintains our own open source implementation of Zanzibar[1] which powers our managed cloud offering, Warrant Cloud[2].

[1] https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant

[2] https://warrant.dev

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by rzzzt on Sunday June 25, 2023 @03:45PM (#36471884)

The actual implementation is closed source. The backing idea is described in the inaugural paper which third parties have used to build hosted and open source alternatives that you can try.

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by ec109685 on Sunday June 25, 2023 @04:31PM (#36472298)

Yeah, it’s really frustrating when Google EOL’s a paper they published.

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by jsnell on Sunday June 25, 2023 @05:37PM (#36472838)

If you genuinely aren't trying to be snarky, then what was the point of this post? You clearly don't even know what Zanzibar is. If you were trying to find out more about it there would be hundreds of more useful questions to ask.

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by sowbug on Sunday June 25, 2023 @05:47PM (#36472944)

This tired trope has jumped the shark with this comment. Not only is it off topic, but even if it did refer to an actual Google product, it's disingenuous because its only point was to be snarky.

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by lopkeny12ko on Sunday June 25, 2023 @08:25PM (#36474157)

It's not disingenuous. Unless you've been living under a rock, Google has a very reliable track record of killing projects [0]. It's a very reasonable question.

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by esafak on Sunday June 25, 2023 @08:41PM (#36474269)

Zanzibar is a system described in a public paper, not a product; it can't be killed. Indeed, it has been implemented as a service by numerous other companies.

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Re:Understanding Google Zanzibar and Why it Shines at Buildi... by kweingar on Sunday June 25, 2023 @09:15PM (#36474523)

I'm confused as to why anyone outside Google would care about the possibility of Google deprecating Zanzibar. It's an internal-only project that handles authorization across Google services. It's totally invisible to all users and customers. I can't think of a reason why anybody would be affected by Google switching to a new global authorization system.

What are you concerned about here: a potential impact on users, or the internal impact for Google engineers that could come from switching to a new system?

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