Guest: Gabriel L. Manor (LinkedIn)
Company:  Permit.io (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Access control is one of the most critical aspects of software and is also one of the most complex. At the Open Source Summit (Vancouver), AWS open-sourced its policy engine, Cedar, providing opportunities for the community to create better software. Permit.io has become one of the first companies to offer support for Cedar to help simplify the complexity of access control for developers.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Gabriel L. Manor, Director of DevRel at Permit.io while at Open Source Summit in Vancouver. They discuss AWS’s decision to open-source Cedar and the current trends in policy and access control. He goes on to explain how Permit.io is helping customers deploy policies at scale using Cedar and other policy engines. 

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Manor explains how they have seen exponential growth of Open Policy Agent (OPA) with the Rego language in the last couple of years. There is a growing trend among big tech like AWS of wanting application developers to declare policy instead of just writing policy in their software. 
• AWS has recently open-sourced Cedar. The company has its own cloud product, Amazon Verified Permissions (AVP) to support Cedar. Manor discusses how access control remains a top priority for organizations and how open-sourcing Cedar is helping the community develop safer and more secure applications. 
• Manor explains how AWS has provided the backbone and Permit.io’s tool helps orchestrate everything to sync the data to get the policy decisions. He explains how their tool works to help deploy policies at scale. 
• AWS has released Cedar as a language and library to be able to get policy decisions, with the library being written in Rust. Manor details Permit.io’s partnership with AWS. 
• Manor discusses how the nature of open source is agnostic, so it is possible to plug different data sources into Permit.io’s plan for the permit engine. They are also planning to add support to more policy engines, although the community can also help orchestrate and administer more policy engines as well. 
• Complexity remains a challenge for the cloud-native landscape, but its fast-growing community is trying to make software simpler. Manor believes that the more we shift left, the more it helps tackle the complexity challenge for developers. He explains how it has simplified authorization for developers.
• Many companies are looking to become more cost-effective. Permit.io is helping companies achieve this by providing developer tools that enable developers to deliver more functionality and create a simpler way to deliver better software. Manor discusses how this is helping to lower costs. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.