EDITOR’s NOTE: Amido Stacks is part of the larger Auth0 ecosystem. We invited Amido CTO Simon Evans to explain the value of using Amido Stacks with Auth0.
For any organization embarking on a cloud-native digital transformation journey, identity quickly emerges as a key enabler for realizing a paradigm shift in a business’s purpose and model. The shift from on-premises systems hidden behind firewalls to cloud-native services that are intentionally exposed over the internet demands that authentication and authorization be paramount concerns when delivering any solution in the cloud.
Amido is a cloud-native technology consultancy based in the UK. We believe in the power of collaboration to create the best business outcomes for our clients, using whichever technologies are the right fit for their unique needs. Organizations like ASOS, Save the Children, and the AA rely on Amido to boost revenue growth, upload users more quickly, and maintain continuous uptime.
At Amido, we have always strived to “deliver more by coding less.” Using cloud-native services is one strategy we employ to achieve this: it enables us to solve commonly found complex concerns more quickly. This approach allows us to focus on the unique business outcomes our clients need us to deliver.
Auth0 typifies the kind of cloud-native service we at Amido love to advocate for and provide to our clients: an extensible platform that enables incremental, iterative delivery and helps you deliver a seamless, secure digital experience.
Platforms Over Products
At Amido, when we assess a cloud vendor’s offering, we value platforms over products. The term “platform” is very overloaded in our industry, so what does it mean here, and why do we value platforms?
A platform is software that delivers value not only from the features it provides but also through the extensibility it exposes. Platforms thrive in connected ecosystems of software. Products, on the other hand, provide broad, rich feature sets, but at the cost of how extensible or connected, they are. More specifically, well-designed platforms tend to support the following principles for businesses that adopt them:
- Open systems over vendor lock-in
- Control of customer experiences over prefabricated, brittle user interfaces
- Building for change over building to last
- Reuse of existing investments over replacing systems by default
- Incremental iterative delivery over a big bang release
- Automation over operation
Auth0 is a great partner for Amido because its service fits our architectural principles so well. The Auth0 platform focuses on the complex and specific functional surface area that is identity. Developer-friendly, standards-compliant, and heavily connected to other platforms in an ecosystem, Auth0 is a valuable addition to microservice architectures that support incremental, iterative delivery and are built for change.
Automate Development with Amido Stacks
Amido recently announced our cloud-native software factory called Amido Stacks. As a software factory for cloud native-solutions, Amido Stacks assembles software through automation of proven code assets and integration with cloud services from other vendors. Amido Stacks supports a rich ecosystem of platforms and services, including Auth0.
Stacks is focused on reducing the risk and increasing the predictability of complex digital transformations by industrializing the development process. Amido Stacks focuses on elements of delivery that are necessarily complex yet hard to commoditize into a service. Concerns such as designing for scale or security are critical in bespoke development, but more often than not, these issues only manifest themselves late in the delivery cycle.
How Amido Stacks works
Creating software with Amido Stacks starts with decisions, and those decisions define workloads that run in the cloud. Workloads are initially generated using our scaffolding solution, built using Terraform templates.
For example, you might choose to scaffold a server-side rendered website built using React and Node.js, hosted in containers on Microsoft Azure (using Azure Kubernetes) and backed with storage provided through Cosmos DB. Amido Stacks will scaffold the core solution and create a build pipeline for your chosen CICD tool. You can choose which testing frameworks you want to use and start deploying your new solution in a matter of hours.
When you scaffold your website or service, you have the option of consuming an Auth0 tenant, using OpenID Connect, and using OAuth 2. The code required in the website to hook into Auth0’s Universal Login page is generated as part of the scaffolding, and any API workloads you choose to create have all the required plumbing to validate bearer tokens via OAuth 2.
In the spirit of openness, we have also open-sourced Amido Stacks at https://stacks.amido.com. There are no restrictions on its use, and we encourage community contributions to the project. Like Auth0, our aim is to make developers’ lives more productive, and we hope that you find Amido Stacks useful.
About Auth0
Auth0 by Okta takes a modern approach to customer identity and enables organizations to provide secure access to any application, for any user. Auth0 is a highly customizable platform that is as simple as development teams want, and as flexible as they need. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. For more information, visit https://auth0.com.
