The concept of microservices sounds fairly easy. And it is. Until you start adding requirements. For example, here are some common real-life scenarios: We want to authenticate users with SSO (OAuth2/OpenID Connect). And we don’t want to store access tokens in the front end anymore because it’s 2022 and we’re…

Explaining the concepts, use-cases, and possibilities of the OAuth2 protocol — OAuth stands for Open Authorization. OAuth is an open standard for access delegation. The OAuth protocol was developed as a solution for granting access to a limited set of resources for a predefined period of time without sharing usernames and passwords. OAuth has been widely adopted and may very well…

In today’s digital landscape, delivering exceptional user experiences while ensuring robust security measures is paramount for the success of web applications. By shifting the responsibility of aggregating data from multiple sources to the BFF, and thereby minimizing HTTP requests made by the front-end, the BFF pattern improves the overall user…

A distributed app is an app that runs on several machines in a network. A distributed app processes workload by delegating parts of the work to several machines which process their workload in parallel. There is no concise definition of what a ‘distributed app’ is. …

Reverse proxies are used to route traffic to servers in a network. Or, from a Kubernetes perspective: A reverse proxy is used to route traffic to the correct Pod. A reverse proxy is a mechanism that prevents direct access to components in the network. Instead, it forwards it. This article…

The Authorization Code flow with Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) is an authentication method. It’s part of OAuth2. It is used to authenticate end-users. The OAuth2 protocol has been patched a couple of times over time. Some authentication methods turned out to be less secure than expected. Read about…

OAuth2 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocols are robust and reliable solutions for establishing secure access control and verifying identities. While OAuth2 focuses on authorization, granting or denying access to valuable resources, OpenID Connect extends OAuth2 by providing an identity protocol that emits the identity of individuals or machines. One notable…

In many cases, it is desirable to use a BFF (Backend For Frontend) as an Authentication Gateway when you have a microservices architecture. Microservices are often hosted on a Kubernetes-based platform, like Azure Container. However, since Microsoft Azure Container Apps manages is in essence a managed Kubernetes Cluster, it does…

To make your web application more secure, it is recommended to migrate token handling to the server-side rather than the client-side. Unfortunately, to many organisations, this may seem rather complex. But it doesn’t have to be. Complete the following three steps to implement the BFF Security Pattern with IdentityServer4: Configure…