Comment by x86x87 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by x86x87 | Hacker News Reader

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So you're solving an organizational problem by using gql? Who needs proper authz/authn, security, scalability, sanity, qos if we can have frontend dev velocity? Checks out.

Solving organizational problems is a core component of any software you design in any organization that's not a 100% flat startup unfortunately.

> "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." - Melvin E. Conway

It's unavoidable. You can bury your head in the sand about it and demand that the technical structure only match your technical requirement, but then the organizational structure of the company will grind to a hault. People will always be people. Just because you give some of them a title like "Engineer" doesn't mean that we won't conflict on people problems.

Entire concepts like event driven architectures or microservices, while might have plethora of technical pros/cons are mainly pushed by management for their non-technical aspects. One of their main non-technical pro is organizational. If your component just emits events, handles events, and is implemented as a separate microservice then you can always just insert a team, or move a team in an organizational structure while minimizing the overall impact to a project.

> So you're solving an organizational problem by using gql?

Yes, of course! All problems are organizational problems at scale. I have no great love for gql, but painting it as a black and white decision pitting FE velocity against all other engineering concerns (including hyperbole like "sanity") is childish. There are legit tradeoffs discussions to be had, but if you think it's impossible to secure or scale gql then you're not a very imaginative or resourceful engineer.

Don't we solve organizational problems with software all the time?

Git Monorepo vs Polyrepo Microservices vs Monolith Kubernetes

Reminds me of Conway's Law, which states that the structure of your systems will mirror the structure of your organization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

See also: Reverse Conway.

The simplest way to add auth is to read a user session and provide it in the context, and then do the logic in the resolver for access control. It's not any different from how you would do it in a regular REST based server and GraphQL certainly doesn't do anything specific to get in your way about it. Not sure why people keep bringing auth and scalability into it. Clearly facebook invented and uses it for the purpose of auth and scalability.

GraphQL really needs a gateway like Envoy to give better observability / control / auth, and indeed that’s how lots of people deploy it.

Okay. Tell me how you do the control/auth and allow certain users to access a resource while others do not access it while they may formulate complex queries where they ask for the kitchen sink.

By wrapping the code that loads data with code that checks whether the current (i.e. requesting) user is allowed to load that data. I don't really understand the problem, how is this any more difficult than any other API paradigm?

I think the additional issues come when you want to define access by a relationship instead of just the entity, which means you need to check access based on the edges, and not the nodes. You'd have to do this anyway with REST, but I think it's easier in some ways to make mistakes and allow more access than intended.

I honestly don't understand the complaints here. In our deployment it's implemented as an HTTP handler right next to all the REST ones and gets all of the standard authz/authn/obervability wrappers. It's allowed us to focus more on core development because the schema was exported over a year ago and hasn't changed much. It functions almost identically to the REST components but is easier to develop against. No issues with scale or performance that aren't apparent in the REST components either.

Honestly there’s a few good ways to do that. Schema directives, regular old permission system at the resolver level, etc.

I’m not a big fan of GraphQL, but I it’s not particularly difficult to secure.

https://konghq.com/blog/engineering/graphql-authorization-at... has a pretty comprehensive look into one way to handle auth with Kong. I believe Envoy can do something similar. It’s not as easy as an htaccess with regex on routes but it’s not impossible.

This is handled at the library level, typically. For example in graphql-ruby, it’s built in [1]

[1] https://graphql-ruby.org/authorization/visibility.html

> Tell me how you do the control/auth and allow certain users to access a resource while others

how would you do this with REST? or any other kind of API? graphql, at it's core, is a tool for the frontend to describe to the backend what data it wants. how the backend replies to that is completely up to the backend.

> formulate complex queries where they ask for the kitchen sink

most concrete implementations i've seen include a way to limit complexity. in `graphql-ruby` for example, you can limit how many nodes, and you can apply a "cost" to a particularly expensive-to-calculate node if you like. Say you give an API only 10 "complexity points". You could make most nodes cost 1 point, and expensive nodes cost 3 points. Now, someone can _request_ the kitchen sink, but you can respond with a "no".

Is it not possible without Envoy? IMO this feels like a failing if I'm relying on a separate piece of software. I'm comparing it with RESTish services which are easily scaleable in many ways either software or infra. But that might be my misunderstanding of what you just said

It’s something that’s handled a lot these days at BigCos by service / query gateways / proxies and in the places that utilize these heavily it’s pretty automated from my experience. Basically the dev experience is you go into some web ui or make a PR against some JSON / yaml policy to allow whatever then it just works because some other sec / infra team plumed in all the auth and access control parts.

GQL itself doesn’t attempt to solve authZ or authN by design.

Edit: if you want to do this with nginx or within graphql / express, this is what that could look like https://www.apollographql.com/blog/backend/auth/a-guide-to-a...

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