Many companies are adopting micro-services based architectures to promote decoupling and separation of concerns in their applications. One inherent challenge with breaking applications up into small services is that now each service needs to deal with authenticating and authorizing requests made to it. Json Web Tokens (JWTs) offer a clean solution to this problem along with TLS client authentication lower down in the stack. Wils Dawson and I presented these topics to the Java User...

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Okta has been an agile development shop since the beginning. One important aspect of being agile is enabling a mix of bottom-up and top-down decision making. Specifically where high level vision and strategy is clearly communicated enabling teams to autonomously deliver value while also feeding back learnings from the trenches to inform the high level goals.1 Below are the tacit engineering design principles we’ve used to guide development at Okta. They continue to evolve as...

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