Oso

What is Oso?

Oso is a specialized authorization platform designed to help developers implement fine-grained access control efficiently. It offers a declarative policy language called Polar to define complex permission hierarchies and roles, enabling consistent and scalable authorization across services. Oso Cloud, the managed service offering, separates authorization logic and data from applications, providing APIs for policy management, authorization checks, and data synchronization. This approach reduces development overhead and accelerates secure feature delivery.

Key Features

• Declarative Authorization Language

  Uses Polar, a flexible and expressive language to model roles, permissions, and complex authorization logic.

• Centralized Authorization Service

  Oso Cloud manages authorization data and policies independently from application code, supporting multiple services and microservices.

• Flexible Role and Permission Modeling

  Supports RBAC, nested roles, custom roles, ownership, sharing, and multi-tenancy to fit diverse application needs.

• Powerful Query API

  Enables complex authorization queries beyond simple allow/deny checks, such as listing accessible resources or authorized users.

• Developer-Friendly Tooling

  Includes SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Go, CLI tools, policy validation, debugging, and logging features for smooth integration and maintenance.

• Scalable and Consistent Enforcement

  Designed to handle authorization across monoliths, microservices, REST, and GraphQL APIs with consistent policy enforcement.

Use Cases

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) : Group permissions by roles to manage user access efficiently across features and projects.
• Multi-Tenancy Authorization : Isolate user data and permissions by organization or tenant to ensure secure data separation.
• Resource-Level Access Control : Control access to specific files, folders, or resources with fine-grained policies.
• Custom Role Management : Allow users or admins to define and manage roles tailored to their unique authorization requirements.
• Microservices Authorization : Share and enforce authorization policies consistently across distributed services and APIs.
• UI Authorization and Feature Gating : Dynamically show or hide UI elements and gate features based on user permissions and subscription tiers.

FAQs