There are unquestionable advantages to cloud native technologies, but significant challenges as well. Case in point: microservices authorization. Microservices have, for many companies, become the architecture of choice for cloud native apps — whether for migrating legacy apps or building new cloud native applications.

Many organizations build applications using microservices that often communicate with other distributed services. Ensuring that they remain secure requires a “secure token service,” secure communication protocols (mTLS), authentication, authorization, and data encryption.

Styra Academy, our online training portal for free courses on OPA, Rego, and Styra Declarative Authorization Service, has a new course available - Microservice Authorization! Before diving in, let’s get a better understanding of microservices and some of the authorization challenges developers need to consider. Microservices are everywhere — and securing them presents a unique set of challenges.

Microservices architecture is a convenient way to silo different software services compared to traditional software architecture and design. However, with multiple microservices communicating amongst each other - the attack surface of the network is greatly increased. The security of such a system depends on the security of all the services. Any deviation in the system’s security ultimately undermines the integrity of the entire network.

Microservices fundamentally changed the way we build modern applications. Before microservices, engineers had a small number of huge chunks of code that made up their application. Many apps were a single monolith of code, and some might have been broken out into a frontend, backend and database. So, when a team needed to update or patch their code, they had to do it slowly and with great care because any change to any part affected every other part of their app.

John Laban is the Founder & CEO at OpsLevel. This blog post originally appeared on the OpsLevel blog. Snyk is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for businesses that want to build security into their continuous software development processes. And with their developer-first tooling and best-in-class security intelligence, it’s no surprise.

So you’re running microservices in containers? Congratulations! This is an important step towards meeting those business needs around delivering applications to the hands of your customers as soon as possible. But how can we mitigate any potential risks associated with faster software deployment? Simple, with Snyk.