GraphQL Auth Explosion Case Study

IAM System Demo is the distributed Rails system behind this case study: separate service ownership, ActiveResource remote models, physical Account hierarchy, Group-owned capability grants, GraphQL composition, explicit authorization boundaries, batching, and owner-aligned caches.

Building, Breaking, and Refactoring a Distributed Rails IAM System is the short entry essay. The numbered series below develops the complete argument.

Developer Affordances

These are related to the IAM demo, but they are not numbered parts of the auth-explosion argument. They are the local tooling, scaffolding, and implementation affordances that made the system possible to build, inspect, and stress.

• How I Scaffolded an Entire Distributed Platform in 10 Minutes
• ActiveResource and the Default Implementation that Astounded Me
• Explicit Authorization Contexts at the Model Boundary
• Extracting Cross-Service Models into Shared Gems
• Creating a Million Users
• Devcontainers for Local Distributed Systems
• Foreman for Local Process Orchestration

Case Study Spine

1. Case Study Overview
2. Part 1: Recursive SQL
3. Part 2: Multiple Object Retrieval
4. Part 3: Multiple Object Authorization
5. Part 4: Redis Cache, per Service
6. Part 5: Smart APIs
7. Part 6: GraphQL and Dataloader
8. Conclusion: Architecture Is Throughput
9. Future Explorations