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by dlisboa
1158 days ago
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This kind of service helps you get off the ground much faster. Adding a few social logins, plus email/password, plus MFA is not necessarily slow but it's not fast when you have to create the whole backend. In many applications identity is not the main part of the business. Once you're up and going you can devote time to identity management. Obviously there are Open Source projects and libraries that do the same thing, but usually these companies have better docs and dashboards. So the value is just decreased initial cost at the expense of a possible outage or eventual disruption, but these things happen with any external provider, you just have to make the cost/benefit analysis. A bit like e-mail: e-mail is usually a crucial part of the business too, but nearly no one manages their own e-mail service nowadays. |
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> A bit like e-mail: e-mail is usually a crucial part of the business too, but nearly no one manages their own e-mail service nowadays.
I liken it to a database. Most people use databases in their apps. Some people use a fully managed proprietary solution (graph db, dynamodb), others use a managed solution that conforms to a given standard (managed mysql/postgresql). Some people run databases themselves. But very few people would build a database from scratch.
Auth is much the same. You have a spectrum of needs, based on how much control you need. SaaS solutions get you functionality faster and with less maintenance while giving you less flexibility. Self-hosted solutions let you leverage the efforts of the OSS community or vendor while still maintaining operational control as well as data sovereignty.
Only a very few folks should write their own auth, it's a solved problem with lots of good solutions out there.