Continuous Integration within Auth0
For us, we’ve managed to get a beautiful SSO implementation into Production with shared users spanning our 3 SaaS applications, and simultaneously enabling Social authentication channels for our users. This has been a massive win for us and our customers, and we’re on to the next step: Running down edge cases that we didn’t udnerstand we needed to cater for in our original Solution Architecture.
As we’re a Continuous Integration shop, we really liked the Tenant concept that Auth0 offers, as we have PreProduction tenants that align with our Integration and Staging environments, with us manually maintaining Configuration (Applications, Connections, Rules, Hooks etc) across these tenants/environments.
Now that we’re post-Go Live, the main thing we’ve noticed we missed in our CICD research for Auth0 was the ability to pull a snapshot of Users and User Metadata from a Production Tenant into our PreProduction tenants. So here we go:
CURRENT STATE - We’ve successfully gone live with Auth0 and have both Production and PreProduction tenants where we have manually processes that mirror the configuration between these environments.
CHALLENGE - Our CI/CD pipeline has a requirement for all internal systems to have a like-for-like PreProduction environment. Currently our PreProduction tenant matches our Production tenant in configuration (due to our manual process) but diverges in Users and User Metadata ever since launch. This divergence of Users and User Metadata causes problems with our automated testing when introducing change, as well as replication of Production bugs in PreProd when replicating issues specific to individual users.
GOALS - Duplicate the Users and User Metadata from the Production tenant with a target PreProduction Tenant . This is most practical as a point-in-time snapshot that we replicate into the PreProduction tenant, which we’ll manually trigger when performing a rebuild of our Staging environment with Production data.
NOT GOALS
- No need to replicate passwords, Auth0 ID or other data that we cannot reasonably access or control. Our CICD architecture will obviously just have to work around these limitations
- No need to make this real-time, we’ll just kick this off when we need to refresh User Content in a given PreProduction tenant
- No need to synchronise configuration (Applications, Connections, Rules, Hooks, Emails etc) as part of this solution, given the rate of change here is low and we can do this by hand without too much overhead
QUESTIONS
- Does Auth0 have any established best practice for us to try and reduce the distance between our Prod and PreProd tenants for companies building and maintaining a CI pipeline?
- Does Auth0 have any existing tools that will assist us to achieve this?
- There are definitely Auth0 customers that are trying to achieve similar goals to this. Can you point us to any examples, or any libraries they have developed?