Jake Moshenko on Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System [PWL NYC]

Papers We Love NYC - June 28, 2021



Jake Moshenko, CEO of Authzed, presents Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System (https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/)


In this talk, Authzed’s CEO Jake Moshenko, will talk about what makes Zanzibar a paper worthy of dropping everything and forming a company around. Zanzibar is the singular global-scale authorization service that powers permissions and sharing across all Google properties, including Docs, YouTube, and Cloud IAM. The talk will cover how the paper lays out an engineer-friendly blueprint for building a highly scalable distributed system with flexible consistency guarantees. The talk will also cover details of some of the known existing implementations, and how and why they have deviated from the paper.


Jake Moshenko is an engineering leader that has been building infrastructure tools and services for over 15 years for large companies and startups alike. Having previously struggled to keep up with customer permissions demands on products such as CoreOS’s Quay and Tectonic, he was searching for a better way to do application permissions.

• #science_technology
• #paperswelove
• #google
• #computer_science
• #authorization
• #research