Permify: Open-Source Authorization Service for Complex Permission Rules

Permify is an open-source authorization service that helps developers manage access control in their applications. It's designed to answer questions about user permissions at runtime, such as whether a user can view a specific document or edit certain posts.

The service follows the design of Google Zanzibar, which powers Google's own products. Permify is used when permission rules become complex and start nesting inside each other, and when the same rules need to apply across multiple applications.

Permify allows developers to write permission rules in its own language, which covers role-based access control, relationship-based rules, and attribute-based ones. A key feature of Permify is that it can hold a separate set of rules for each tenant, allowing one deployment to serve many customer organizations without their permissions bleeding together.

Permify is available for free on GitHub and can be started with a single Docker command. It answers checks in tens of milliseconds and supports REST and gRPC calls.