Comment by aeneas_ory
9 hours ago
KeyCloak is great if you want a full stack Java server to run internal workforce for example, but Ory is much better at running high scale (eg at OpenAI https://www.ory.com/case-studies/openai) and in a composable fashion.
Yes we have an commercial version because how else can one finance world class open source powering the biggest software names on the planet? It‘s a good thing that Ory has a business model that works, not a bad thing. And by the way, IBM finds ways to charge you for KeyCloak too ;)
Valid points (although Keycloak was Redhat not IBM and then donated by them to CNCF), but should "security SLAs for CVEs" be listed as a premium feature?
Looked at the case study, uses Cockroach which is now commercial, so potentially with the dual costs of Ory and Cockroach licenses, unless you need massive scale, would be too expensive for small/medium and also startups? Unless your sole focus is on enterprises?
And Keycloak also has such a implementation https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/deploying-keycloak-on-coc...
My mistake - I thought it‘s now just under the IBM corp but it is indeed in CNCF. Still, IBM offers a commercial product around KeyCloak.
If you serve 900m weekly active users, you need this type of distributed database architecture that is expensive to run. But at that point the cost of running it is a fraction of overall infra spend. No start up really needs this level of scale, only Enterprises (hence it‘s gated). Making Cockroach work is more work than just wiring up the SQL, you actually need to deal with it like dynamodb under the hood and use primary keys efficiently, avoid hotspots, and all that jazz.
Most companies (like Cloudflare!) do just fine with Postgres and one of our services. Ory Hydra is written in Go, doesn’t need JVM, very little RAM, doesn’t need caches or start up time due to cold starts. The architecture is different and that makes it cheap and fast to run. From the blog post - they run Hydra on 0.6 vCPU and 200MB of RAM. That’s probably as cheap as it gets!
It‘s a different tool for a different problem than KeyCloak - both have their place.
Just for clarity: Cloudflare runs authentik for their workforce identity. (source/disclosure: am CEO)
Glad to see them making use of Hydra for OAuth apps!
Yes, Java based is never going to be as good as a more modern language like Go