I create a CMS from scratch and decided to use CouchDB as my database solution. For my CMS I need various accounts and of course different user roles (admin, author, unregistered user, etc.).
First I thought I would program authorization within my CMS myself, but CouchDB has stuff like this build in, so I want to ask:
What is the best practice creating a multiuser app with CouchDB?
Create only one admin for CouchDB and manage restrictions, roles and accounts by yourself?
Use build-in functionality of CouchDB for all this? (Say create a CouchDB admin user for every admin of the CMS?)
What if I want to add other 3rd-party authorization later? Say I want users to login via Twitter/Facebook/Google?
Greetings,
Pipo
The critical question is whether you want to expose CouchDB to the public or not.
If you want to build your CMS as a classical 3-tier architecture where CouchDB is exclusively accessed from a privileged scripting layer, e.g. PHP, then I would recommend you to roll your own authorization system. This will give you better control over the authorization logic. Particularly, you can realize document based read access control (not available in the CouchDB security system).
If instead you want to expose CouchDB to the public, things are different. You cannot actually write server side logic (except for separate asynchronous listeners via the changes feed) so you will have to use CouchDB's built in authentication/authorization system. That limits you to read access controlled on a database level (not document level!). Write access can be controlled with validation functions. CouchDB admins should not be equivalent to application admins as a CouchDB admin is rather comparable to a server admin in a traditional setting. A database admin in CouchDB would be a better fit (can change design documents and therefore make modifications to the CMS installation like adding plugins). All other users with write access can be realized as database members.
I would prefer the second approach, because this will give you the possibility to leverage all the nice features of CouchDB like replication and the changes feed. However, you will have to do some filtered replication between databases with different members if you need fine grained read access control.
If you want to use other authentication mechanisms than those offered by CouchDB, you will eventually have to modify the installation (which can be an issue if you want to use a hosted CouchDB). For a facebook plugin see e.g. https://github.com/ocastalabs/CouchDB-Facebook-Authentication.
Related
We are a SaaS product and we would like to be able have per-user data exports that will be used with various analytical (BI) tools like Tableau or PowerBI. Instead of just managing all those exports manually, we thought of using some cloud database such as AWS Redshift (which will be part of our service). But then, it is not clear how is user will access those databases naturally, unless we do some kind of SSO integration with AWS.
So - what is the best practice for exporting data for analytics use in SaaS products?
In this case you can build your security in to your backend API layer.
First you can set up processes to load your data to Redshift, then make sure that only your backend API server/cluster has access to redshift (e.g. through a vpc with no external ip access to redshift)
Now you have your data, you can validate your user as usual through your backend service, then when a user requests a download through the backend API, the backend can create a query to extract from redshift only the correct data based upon the users security role. In order to make this possible you may need to build some kind of security column into your redshift data model.
I am assuming getting data to redshift is not a problem.
What you are looking for, if I understand correctly is a OEM solutions.
The problem is how does one mimic the security model you have in place for your SaaS offering.
That depends on how complex is your security model.
If it is as simple as just authenticate the user and he has access to all tenant data or the data can be easily filtered for user. Things are simple for you. Trusted authentication will allow you to authenticate that user and user filtering will allow you to show him all that he has access to.
But here is the kicker, if your security is really complex , then it can become really difficult to mimic it within these products.
Here for integrating tableau this link will help:-
https://tableau.github.io/embedding-playbook/#
Power BI, this product am not a fan off. I tried to embed a view in one my applications and data refresh was a big issue.
Its almost like they want you to be a azure shop for real time reporting.( I like GCP more )
If you create the api's and populate datasets then they have crazy restrictions like 1MB/sec etc.
On the other instances datasets can be refreshed only 8 times.
I gave up on them.
Very recently I got a call from Sisense and they seemed promising as well from a OEM perspective. You might was to try them.
I'm building an offline-first app but didn't research on it until now. My current setup is the app uses Angular(1.x) and communicates to my server using NodeJS on a MongoDB Database. I'm using PassportJS for my authentication at the moment.
I'd like to migrate all my date to CouchDB and use PouchDB on my app.
How do I migrate from my current setup to PouchDB to CouchDB?
How can I authenticate my users after migration?
How do I migrate my current setup to CouchDB
Moving data
To export/import data from mongo to couch, you can simply follow these steps. Basically, you just dump your jsons and push them in Couch.
Structuring data
In CouchDB, there's no collections. Usually, to split your data into "collections", you simply add a special key to identify the collection. It can be type or collection for example.
Permissions
I'm not aware of the permissions system in MongoDB but basically, you can only define permissions at database level. So if you want some people to access certain documents, you can either use an application layer to handle permissions or you can split your documents with the per-user-pattern(One database per user and one global database without all public data).
Authentification
You can still use passportjs with CouchDB(see this example).
Also, you can use CouchDB authentification system which is builtin. Therefore, it has some limitations(eg: you can't expire someone's token and there's not builtin password recovery system).
I've been thinking about this quite a while and it's bugging my head off, lets say we have a website a mobile app and a database.
Usually when we develop our websites we pretend to store our database credentials in a configuration file and connect the website directly to the database without using a multi-tier architecture, but when it comes to a mobile application such Android or iOS this applications can be engineer reversed meaning that there's a risk of exposing your database credentials.
So I started thinking about this multi-tier architecture and kind of thinking about how Facebook and other social network do their job, they usually make an API and use a lot of HTTP Requests.
Usually social networks APIs have a app_id and a secret_key, this secret key would be used to increase the safety of the application but I'm thinking about how could I store these keys inside my application since I would go back to the begining of my discussion, if I was to use Java I could use the Java Preference Class but that isn't safe either has I saw in this question, plus I would need to make sure my HTTP Requests are CSRF safe.
So, how could I store these keys inside my app? What's the best way to do it, since hard-codding it's out of the question.
You should always require users to log in - never store credentials or private keys in an app you'll be distributing. At the very least, don't store them unless they're specific to the user who has chosen to store them after being validated.
The basic idea is that the user should have to be authenticated in some manner, and how you do that is really too broad to cover in a SO answer. The basic structure should be:
User asks to authenticate at your service and is presented with a challenge
User responds to that challenge (by giving a password or an authentication token from a trusted identity provider).
Service has credentials to access the database, and only allows authenticated users to do so.
There are entire services out there built around providing this kind of thing, particularly for mobile apps.
You might store the users own credentials on the device, and if so it should be encrypted (but you're right, a malicious app could potentially pick them up).
Bottom line: never distribute hard coded access to a database directly.
I am a newbie in Microsoft Azure platform. I want to create multiple databases dynamically (We are developing multi-tenant model. So, Each organization should have their own database. Whenever an organization is registered with our system, we need to create a new database dynamically). Please provide some insights on this.
By using Azure Resource Manager Templates you can reliably deploy the whole infrastructure required by each organisation. So if they need a webserver, database and middleware servers, you can define the whole thing in a template and reliably deploy that for every client.
(from the above link)
You can deploy, manage, and monitor all of the resources for your solution as a group, rather than handling these resources individually.
You can repeatedly deploy your solution throughout the development lifecycle and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state.
You can use declarative templates to define your deployment.
You can define the dependencies between resources so they are deployed in the correct order.
You can apply access control to all services in your resource group because Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is natively integrated into the management platform.
You can apply tags to resources to logically organize all of the resources in your subscription.
You can clarify billing for your organization by viewing the rolled-up costs for the entire group or for a group of resources sharing the same tag.
The link above has a lot of resources for learning how to use templates as well as the syntax and usage.
There are a large number of templates at the Azure ARM Template Github page and even some pre-existing templates to get you started deploying SQL Server to Azure (there's also mysql and postgress if you prefer)
Plus many others that you can work through to get accustomed to how they work.
you can use the AZURE SQL Database REST API to do so, its as simple as sending a PUT Request to a URL https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subscription-id}/resourceGroups/{resource-group-name}/providers/microsoft.sql/servers/{server-name}/databases/{database-name}?api-version={api-version}
Check out these links for more details
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/mt163571.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/mt163685.aspx
We are beginning to implement Sitecore for our website at my company. We are in the midst of the discovery phase and evaluating Active Directory module. We have 40-50 users who will be using Sitecore and over a 100 users who will be using some customized applications on top of Sitecore.
The consultancy we hired are asking us to not go with Active Directory since only 40-50 users will be using it. I on the other hand think that using the Active Directory module would be useful in the long run.
Do you guys have any input? What is the recommended practice?
Thanks
It really comes down to how you want to govern your CMS users. The AD module bubbles up those users into the CMS as users and thus exposes them for login. You can even do the same with groups/units. The advantage here is that if a new person joins your org, if you add them to the OU or assign then to a group that has Sitecore access then they gain access to Sitecore.
On the flip side, if you want Sitecore to be it's own entity with its own user profiles and logins, it can do that in a silo without the AD connection
To the CMS, there is no difference where the users are actually authenticated because the provider you select is low level. So the ultimate decision would be more of a governance / IT / process decision as there's really no functional difference.
My recommendation for you is to come up with scenarios or use cases and think through each in both scenarios. Eg you hire 10 people that need author access. With the AD module you just assign them to the OU or group that inherits te author roles in Sitecore and you're done.
I have implemented the Active Directory module a few times now and it works really well when you want to have users to be able to SSO into the authoring interface and manage your security access within Active Directory. You can also use it well for doing end-user SSO if you are building something like an Intranet application on Sitecore.
From a security management perspective, it becomes easier for the organization and also allows you to not worry about having to duplicate users between different environments (Dev, Test, Prod).
That being said, there is a performance overhead with using the Active Directory module that is not present if you use only the native Sitecore security provider. With your number of users, you probably won't see any difference, but with extremely large AD directories with complex group memberships you may run into performance issues if you are using indirect membership (i.e. groups within groups).
An example scenario:
Content item in Sitecore is secured to the role MyDomain\SuperAuthor
User A is directly a member of MyDomain\SuperAuthor
User B is a member of MyDomain\SuperUser
MyDomain\SuperUser group is a member of MyDomain\SuperAuthor
If you use the Sitecore security provider, resolving User B's access is very efficient. Sitecore is able to check the indirect membership quickly using the roles within the system.
If you use the Active Directory module, the indirect membership is disabled by default. Only User A would have access. If you change the configuration setting to enable indirect membership, the module will then allow User B to have access, however you will begin to see a slower performance for that scenario.
As I mentioned before, however, if Active Directory is not very complex as to what is being pulled into Sitecore, you should be fine and probably won't notice these performance impacts.
I don't think number of users should be the sole reason to decide on whether or not to integrate AD nor should it be because you may or may not need it in the long run. I would say integrate with AD because of its most obvious benefits
Single user name and password
Better security
Ease of maintenance
Although number of users becomes and important deciding factor when you need to create several thousand users and setup authorization for them.
The most common reason users are manually created and maintained in sitecore is when you need to create a handful of authors and approver accounts mostly for the marketing team. But if you foresee implementing membership or need to provide access and authorization based on an existing user and group policy then go for AD integration.