A couple of weeks ago I announced I was leaving IBM. Today I'm happy to share details on where I'm going next (or to be clear, where I'm working right now). As you have hopefully figured out already, today is my first day at Auth0. I first discovered Auth0 nearly a year ago when working on a proof of concept with OpenWhisk (OpenWhisk, Serverless, and Security - a POC). At the time I was really impressed with their identity product. Not only did it really simplify something I hate doing myself (identity), it also did it really darn well.
I started talking with folks there and was introduced to other parts of their platform, specifically Webtask and Extend.
My role at Auth0 is to be a developer advocate for Extend. At the highest level, you can think of Extend as a way for a service to provide serverless customization to their users. A great example of this is GitHub. GitHub lets you respond to events by use of webhooks. Basically, the user tells GitHub, "Hey, hit this URL with details of the change and I'll do stuff." Webhooks work, but obviously require you to set up a server, or use a serverless platform to host the code.
Auth0 Extend allows a user to actually write the code directly at the site and not worry about setting anything up at all. It makes customizations incredibly easy as there is nowhere else the user has to go. And because there is a more intimate connection between your service and the user's customization, you can provide more support out of the box then you would get in a traditional serverless platform.
I admit - this may not make much sense at first and you are probably thinking that a blog post would clear things up. Good! I've actually got a demo built using LoopBack and Extend that really demonstrates things well. It needs to be cleaned up a bit but I should have that out this week. I'll also be spending time on the docs side of things to help make it easy for newcomers.
Along with Extend, I'll be spending time talking about Webtask too. It's a serverless platform and drives both Auth0 Extend and customizations for the identity side. It's a pretty cool platform and I've already begun to migrate some of my OpenWhisk code over to it. To be clear, I'm absolutely not saying anyone should stop using OpenWhisk. I think it is an incredible framework. But as a learning exercise, I'm finding it useful to migrate my stuff over so I can see how things are done with Webtask.
While I plan on doing a lot of writing at Auth0, I'll still be blogging here of course. In general I try to update here when I've written something significant elsewhere, so don't forget you can subscribe for notifications on new posts. My speaking engagements page also shows where I'll be next so if you and I will be in the same place and you want to talk more about Auth0, just drop me a line.
Archived Comments
Grats on the new gig! Hadn't heard of Auth0, looks pretty interesting. I cringe when a client starts talking about implementing SSO "yeah would love to work on that but have that thing to do for the rest of the uh, epoch, yeah."
Looking forward to your posts about the goodies.
Nice job on the new path Raymond. The best of luck to you. I will continue to follow your posts since your career is in line with my goals as a developer and have already learned a bit from your shares.
Welcome! I am really looking forward to working with you!
Congrats buddy!
Congrate, Raymond! You do get around!
Congrats on the new job, Ray. I look forward to hearing about the technologies your new employer has available. And maybe even how it can be integrated with CF. ;-) My apps usually hold sensitive data so I'm against allowing logins using social media IDs because we can't enforce how strong a password the user has set, and it's more likely to be a target of hacking than our own less-known service. But I still want to learn about Auth0. I mean, you wouldn't go and work for anyone unless they had super interesting products, right? :-)
So while I'm not going to be working in the Identity area, do know that Auth0 supports non-social logins as well as social. You can use your own datastore, or have us host it. You can also setup password rules and the such. What I like about the Identity product is that supports the "quick and simple" auth scenarios as well as the more complex ones. I like a platform that handles both ends of the spectrum. ;)
As for Extend, yes, you absolutely could use it within the context of a ColdFusion application. Once my intro article goes live (most likely on the Auth0 blog, but I'll leave a note on my blog to alert readers of it), you'll see an example of integration with Node, but the same principal would apply to any platform.
I was just reading your multistep form article and saw this. I’m getting ready to integrate Auth0 into a new site but I need authorization, and the authorization plug in, well, is that ready for production use?9
To be clear, are you asking if Auth0 is ready for production use? If so - heck yeah. It's got an incredible amount of real world, production use.
Not so much auth0 in general for authentication, but the authorization plug in specifically. Thanks
Sorry - can you explain what plugin you mean specifically?
I should have said extension sorry. Basically role based perms encoded in the JWT token. Just haven’t seen good examples of this with vue. https://auth0.com/docs/exte...
Well to your first question - is the extension ready for production - I'd say yes. I haven't used this, but I know if we document it it's meant to be used versus something that may be an experiment.
If you are asking about it's use in Vue and examples, the best I could suggest is Googling for it. In theory it shouldn't matter what front end library you use. While the Identity aspect of Auth0 isn't my main task in this new job, I *do* want to try it with Vue myself just to see it in action.
Lastly - if you need specific help on it, you may want to try to the forums here: https://community.auth0.com/. Not saying you can't ask me (grin), but you may get more experienced responses there. :)
Really appreciate all of the responses. Best of luck in your new gig.