Build an Angular App with Okta's Sign-In Widget in 15 Minutes
AngularJS reigned as king of JavaScript MVC frameworks for several years. However, when the Angular team announced they would not provide backwards compatibility for their next version, there was a bit of a stir in its community, giving opportunities for frameworks like React and Vue.js to flourish. Fast forward a few years and both Angular 2 and Angular 4 have been released. Many developers are trying its TypeScript and finding the experience a pleasant one....
Get Started with Spring Boot, OAuth 2.0, and Okta
If you’re building a Spring Boot application, you’ll eventually need to add user authentication. You can do this with OAuth 2.0 (henceforth: OAuth). OAuth is a standard that applications can use to provide client applications with “secure delegated access”. It works over HTTP and authorizes devices, APIs, servers, and applications with access tokens rather than credentials. Very simply, OAuth is a protocol that supports authorization workflows. It gives you a way to ensure that a...
Get Started with Spring Boot, SAML, and Okta
How to use KentorIT AuthServices with Okta
If you’re wondering how to configure an ASP.NET application with KentorIT’s AuthServices and Okta, you’ve come to the right place. But before delving into the specifics of how to make Okta work with an SAML-enabled ASP.NET application powered by KentorIT AuthServices, it is worth spending some time going over a critical, but easily fixable issue: Important note : As of March 22nd, 2016, you have 2 choices: Either get the source code of the AuthServices...
REST Service Authorization with JWTs
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...
Demystifying OAuth
It seems that OAuth 2.0 is everywhere these days. Whether you are building a hot new single page web application (SPA), a native mobile experience, or just trying to integrate with the API economy, you can’t go far without running into the popular authorization framework for REST/APIs and social authentication. During Oktane15, Karl McGuinness, our Senior Director of Identity, demystified the powerful, yet often misunderstood, world of OAuth 2.0 and shared details on Okta’s growing...
TLS Client Authentication for Internal Services
If you’re like me, the most aggravating thing is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly describes the issue you are facing, only to scroll down and see that it has remained unanswered since 2011. I was recently trying to configure Transport Layer Security (TLS) client authentication (also referred to as mutual SSL) between two internal services at Okta and found the lack of complete examples astonishing. I hope that this blog post provides a...
The New Age of Trust
I recently read an excellent article about how amazing products shape the trust relationship with customers. I think great products are the first step in building a trust relationship. And like other aspects of the product that are derived from the product but are not physically part of it, the trust relationship is now more important than ever before. When you use a product, every engagement with that product has a direct correlation with your...
How Okta Chased Down Severe System CPU Contention in MySQL
Sometimes fixing a problem causes or reveals a new one. And sometimes this sets off a chain reaction of problems and fixes, where each solution exposes a deeper issue. In technology, cascades like these are common, often painful, and occasionally welcome. Our battle against CPU contention last fall is a good example of such a cascade. What began as a buffer pool adjustment triggered a series of issues and fixes that generated plenty of stress,...
Okta Software Engineering Design Principles
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...