Book Image

Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications

By : Stian Thorgersen, Pedro Igor Silva
Book Image

Keycloak - Identity and Access Management for Modern Applications

By: Stian Thorgersen, Pedro Igor Silva

Overview of this book

Implementing authentication and authorization for applications can be a daunting experience, often leaving them exposed to security vulnerabilities. Keycloak is an open-source solution for identity management and access management for modern applications, which can make a world of difference if you learn how to use it. Keycloak, helping you get started with using it and securing your applications. Complete with hands-on tutorials, best practices, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to secure a sample application and then move on to securing different application types. As you progress, you will understand how to configure and manage Keycloak as well as how to leverage some of its more advanced capabilities. Finally, you'll gain insights into securely using Keycloak in production. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to install and manage Keycloak as well as how to secure new and existing applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Keycloak
4
Section 2: Securing Applications with Keycloak
11
Section 3: Configuring and Managing Keycloak
17
Section 4: Security Considerations

Enabling clustering

Most of the time, you will be running a Keycloak cluster when going for production. To respect some key non-functional aspects, as well as the Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) defined for your services, enabling clustering is crucial.

In terms of availability, clustering allows you to run multiple Keycloak instances, possibly in different availability zones, so that uptime is not impacted if nodes go down.

From a scalability perspective, clustering allows you to scale your nodes up and down according to the load on your system, helping to keep a consistent response time and throughput.

In terms of failover, a cluster helps you to survive failures when nodes are failing, therefore preventing data loss (mainly that kept in caches) as well as avoiding impacts on general availability.

Keycloak is designed for high availability, where, in addition to the persistent data kept in the database, it also uses a cache layer to replicate and keep state in-memory...