Permit.io Launch Week - Day 5: Fine-Tuned Performance

Welcome to the fifth and final day of Permit.io’s Launch Week! This week, we’ve introduced exciting features focused on improving your experience with Permit.io, from policy modeling to decision-making and integrations. Today, we’re closing out the week with a focus on performance—because once you’ve set up a great authorization system, you need it to perform efficiently in production!

Watch the full live stream of these features here:

Let’s dive into three key performance features that will help you optimize how Permit works in real-world environments:

Log Forwarder: Enhanced Observability for Better Monitoring

The first feature we’re launching today is the Log Forwarder, a tool that will enhance how you monitor and track Permit’s Policy Decision Point (PDP). Observability is crucial for understanding system performance, and this new feature makes it easier to track the decisions made by the PDP.

Tracking and debugging decision-making performance is essential for maintaining a high-performing authorization system. Without proper logging and observability, it can be difficult to identify slow decisions or system bottlenecks.

The Log Forwarder allows you to forward logs from the PDP to any observability platform, such as Elasticsearch, OpenTelemetry, or any other service. This means you can build dashboards, monitor real-time performance, and detect anomalies.

By visualizing decision latency or identifying slow queries, you can debug issues more effectively and optimize the decision-making process.

This feature ensures you have the insights needed to keep your authorization system running smoothly and efficiently.

Local Facts: Faster, More Accurate Decisions with Direct PDP Updates

When it comes to authorization, consistency is key—especially in systems where decisions must be based on the most up-to-date information.

In many authorization systems, data is typically loaded into the policy engine with eventual consistency, where decisions may be made based on slightly outdated information for the sake of speed. While this works in most cases, there are scenarios—such as managing quotas or role changes—where you need strong consistency to ensure decisions are made with up-to-date facts.

That’s why we’re introducing Local Facts, a feature that allows developers to update facts (such as role assignments) directly to the PDP without needing to go through the Permit cloud. This ensures that your system can make faster and more accurate decisions using the latest data at the right time.

This feature also introduces an option to ensure strong consistency by waiting for all PDPs to be fully updated before running the check function, ensuring that the most current data is used across your system.

Additionally, we added a capability to ensure strong consistency across all PDPs before running the check function. This means that for critical operations, like enforcing subscription limits or checking updated permissions, you can ensure the data is fully synchronized across all PDPs before making a decision.

For example, if a user’s role changes or they hit their content quota, this update can be sent directly to the PDPs, ensuring that any future checks use the most current role or data. This balance between local updates for speed and strong consistency for critical operations ensures that your authorization system remains both responsive and accurate.

Read more about Local Facts here.

Offline Mode for PDP: Independent and Reliable Decision-Making

Our third feature today is Offline Mode for the Permit PDP, designed to keep your authorization system running smoothly—even when disconnected from the cloud.

Offline Mode enables the PDP to operate without a live connection to the Permit cloud, ensuring that authorization decisions can still be made in environments where network connectivity may be unreliable.

This means the PDP can retrieve its configuration and policy data once and then continue to operate autonomously. Even if it needs to restart, it can update from its local data partition and resume normal operations. This ensures that authorization decisions are always available, regardless of cloud connectivity. Additionally, this feature supports use cases like data sharding between PDPs, allowing for more resilient and distributed policy management.

Whether running in environments with intermittent connectivity or optimizing performance at the edge, Offline Mode ensures that your system remains responsive under all conditions.

Read more about the PDP offline mode here

Wrapping Up Permit Launch Week

As we wrap up this exciting week, we’ve introduced a wide range of features designed to make authorization easier, faster, and more flexible for developers. Today’s focus on performance ensures that your systems not only work efficiently but can also scale reliably under real-world conditions. Let’s quickly recap today’s announcements:

• Log Forwarder: Provides enhanced observability, enabling you to monitor and optimize decision-making with real-time logging and performance insights.
• Local Facts: Ensure key decisions are made with the most up-to-date data, offering a balance between speed and accuracy.
• Offline Mode: Allows the PDP to run independently of the cloud, providing reliability even in disconnected or edge environments.

These features reflect our commitment to ensuring that Permit.io performs at its best, no matter the scale or complexity of your authorization needs.

Thank you for joining us throughout Permit Launch Week! We’re excited to see how you’ll use these new features to build better, more secure applications.