4 posts tagged with "authorization"

If your deployment environment doesn't support a service mesh like Envoy or an external authorization server (common in simpler, monolithic, or traditional hosting setups), you can certainly move the Casbin authorization check into your Flask application using middleware or decorators.

This approach centralizes authorization logic within the Python code, relying on dedicated extensions like flask-authz or Flask-Casbin.

1. The Casbin Sidecar Pattern​

A sidecar is a helper container that runs alongside your main application container (the Flask app) inside the same Kubernetes Pod [4]. The sidecar, in this case, is the Envoy Proxy, which intercepts all incoming and outgoing traffic for your Flask application.

Centralized Authorization on GCP: Casbin, Envoy, and API Gateway​

Implementing authorization within a web application, especially in a microservices environment, can quickly lead to duplicated or inconsistent security logic. By leveraging the External Authorization Pattern using Envoy Proxy and Casbin, you can decouple security checks from your Flask application, making your architecture cleaner, more secure, and scalable.

This strategy is particularly effective on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) when using services like API Gateway or Cloud Endpoints as the entry point, and Firestore as the persistent policy backend.

Using 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' in an OpenAPI (Swagger) specification requires defining a security scheme and then applying it to the relevant API endpoints. The method for doing this varies slightly between OpenAPI versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.1.