In this article, we will look at the high-level architecture of Zanzibar and understand the valuable lessons it provides for building large-scale systems, particularly around the challenges of distributed authorization.

ByteByteGo provides tutorials, articles, and resources for learning and mastering the Go programming language, covering topics such as syntax, concurrency, and best practices. Developers can learn about Go programming fundamentals, web development with Go, and building scalable applications using Go's powerful features and standard library.

ByteByteGo

Zanzibar is Google's global authorization system that handles over 10 million permission checks per second across services like Drive, YouTube, and Maps. It uses a tuple-based data model to represent permissions, employs zookies (tokens) with Google Spanner's TrueTime for consistency guarantees, and runs on 10,000+ servers across 30+ geographic locations. The system achieves 99.999% availability through distributed caching, request deduplication, and client isolation, with 99% of checks served in 3ms median latency. Key architectural decisions include flexible relation tuples, causality-respecting consistency protocols, and optimized serving layers with intelligent caching strategies.

How Google Manages Trillions of Authorizations with Zanzibar

WorkOS Pipes: Ship Third-Party Integrations Without Rebuilding OAuth (Sponsored)

AI code review with the judgment of your best engineer. (Sponsored)

The Architecture: Distribution and Caching

<p>For a minute there I thought Google had partnered with the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar in Tanzania on doing stuff to passwords.</p>
