Authorization has become quite a hot topic: Intuit, Airbnb, Google, and others have recently described the architectural challenges surrounding authorization at scale and the solutions that they’ve built internally to address them.

As a developer of a B2B SaaS application, you may be scratching your head about how this is relevant to you. Early on in your application’s lifecycle, these challenges may not be obvious: your application typically starts with “regular users” and “admins”; for admin-level operations, you write some code to check whether the logged-in user has admin rights. Life is simple.