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distributedxacmlpeppdpauthzforce

Simulating multiple Policy Decision Points (PDPs) in distributed environment

Let's take a scenario where subjects will be requesting access to many objects per second. A heavy load on a single PDP would mean increase in wait and read/write times per request.

So far I have used the AuthzForce Core project to setup a single PDP for which I have a for loop sending multiple requests (this can be done simultaneously using threads). However, this does not seem like a suitable setup for evaluating my policies in a distributed environment.

Is there any way that it can be done? Perhaps using AuthzForce Server?

Edit:

I am running a Java application which uses Authzforce Core. The program creates an instance of a PDP which loads a single policy document, and then a for loop executes multiple requests. This is all done locally within the program itself.

Solution

  • It is difficult to help improve the performance here without looking at the code or the architecture, but I can give a few general tips (some of them maybe obvious to you but just to be thorough):

    1. Since the PDP is embedded in your Java app, I assume (or make sure you do) you are using AuthzForce native Java API (example on the README), which is the most efficient way to evaluate.

    2. I also assume you are (re-)using the same PDP (BasePdpEngine) instance throughout the lifetime of your application. It should be thread-safe.

    3. In order to evaluate multiple requests at once, you may try the PDP engine's evaluate(List) method ( javadoc ) instead of the usual evaluate(DecisionRequest), which is faster in some cases.

    4. If by "distributed environment", you mean that you may have multiple instances of your Java app deployed in different places, therefore multiple PDPs, the right setup(s) depend on where/how you load the policy document: local file, remote db, etc. See my last comment. As mentioned in Rafael Sisto's answer, you can reuse some guidelines from the High Availability section of AuthzForce Server installation guide there.