Learn how OpenFGA turns an authorization model into a concurrent, backpressure-aware pipeline that streams results as it traverses relationship graphs.

Auth0's platform is a  identity management solution, offering insights into authentication, authorization, and user management for web and mobile applications. Through articles, tutorials, and documentation, Auth0 offers insights into securing applications with modern identity protocols like OAuth and OpenID Connect. Developers can learn about implementing single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and user authorization policies to enhance application security and user experience.

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A deep dive into OpenFGA's ListObjects algorithm, which enumerates all objects a user has a given relation to. The algorithm models authorization as a weighted directed graph and builds a concurrent worker pipeline via depth-first search. Each worker handles a slice of the traversal—querying the datastore, deduplicating, batching, and forwarding messages with backpressure. The post covers special cases like intersection/exclusion operators, tuple-to-userset rewrites, and cycle detection. It also explains three key performance knobs: numProcs (datastore parallelism), bufferSize (backpressure control), and chunkSize (batching efficiency), plus optional dynamic pipe extension for skewed workloads.

Inside OpenFGA's Improved ListObjects Algorithm

Why ListObjects is hard (and why it matters)

From Graph to Pipeline: Building Workers With DFS

Special Cases You Must Handle in Real Use Cases

Performance Tuning: The Knobs That Matter