GoKawiilI recently built a simple feature most customers might never notice as a complex bit of engineering: Infisical users can now grant/deny access to single folders. This is the kind of thing that gets a brief mention in the all-hands and a one-line changelog entry.
RBAC, permissions, and authorization are the same class of engineering project as billing, schema migrations, and audit logs:
They're expected utilities
Users spend as little time on them as possible
They're tricky engineering projects, even when they look simple
The best case is no complaints and that the system is correct. It can never excel. There's no 10x RBAC system people rave about on Twitter. Access controls are a box a product checks, but not a killer feature.
That doesn’t make them less important. Enterprise buyers will never sign an order form without them. And in secrets management (one of the categories Infisical operates in), getting access wrong means someone sees credentials they shouldn't, or a customer’s deployment fails at three in the morning because a service lost access to a secret.
Tailscale and Oso have both written about why authorization is harder than it looks. Building folder-based access taught me the same thing from a different direction.
Why we built folder access
Conceptually, RBAC is simple. Each identity, human or machine, has a role (e.g. admin , member , or guest ) which carries permissions:
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