War-room stories Pt I: Designing role based authorization for Micro-services using Elixir/Erlang OTP

There comes a point in every startup where, as a product architect, you wake up in cold sweat one fine night because you’ve had this “what-if” dream. What if the whole thing topples down? Or you have left out that many crucial use cases? Was it poor engineering, design or a polar opposite of requirements. After a lot of brainstorming you pin to one solution and try to stick to it and keep your ears open to improvizations. Rapid improvizations. Sometimes developers won’t agree and you would need to go back to the drawing board, discussing network level optimizations or scalability vs resource conflict or simply wrong database in the wrong place.

And only then, you would need to rethink facing challenges designing a product that will be battle tested. In such cases, my learning of ‘back of the envelope’ usually comes to the rescue. This is one such story.

[Part 1 of this blog will set the stage for problem, requirements and approach taken. In Part 2 of this blog, we conclude with the solution]

Background

For as long as I can remember, resource ownership has been the crux of most SaaS applications with an option of delegation, resource sharing, back-links and permissions based views.

And for the same period of time, I’ve seen too many project management tools, todos and ERP systems built as modular as possible. Yet they all have felt…