By pre-computing selected transitive relationships in SpiceDB, AuthZed Materialize delivers consistent performance for the authorization logic keeping large scale AI and Enterprise workloads secure.
Today, we're announcing the general availability of AuthZed Materialize for users of AuthZed's Dedicated Cloud. Materialize delivers a new way to scale authorization by precomputing the expensive portions of the relationship graph that drives SpiceDB's authorization logic.
By scalably accelerating SpiceDB, Materialize enables organizations to build applications and AI systems that can grow in users, data, relationships, and agent activity without making security the limiting factor.
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Why This Matters
Modern applications are scaling faster than ever. More users. More data. More resources. More complex relationships. And now, more AI agents are making decisions and taking actions on behalf of those users. With this complexity, authorization has to scale, too.
Every time an application, RAG pipeline, or AI agent accesses a resource, it needs to determine whether that access is allowed. As applications grow and permission models become more sophisticated, those checks can become increasingly complex and increasingly expensive to perform in real time.
Authorization is relatively simple when an application has a small number of users, resources, and relationships. At enterprise scale, it isn't. A single authorization decision can depend on relationships across users, groups, teams, roles, organizations, resources, and hierarchies. As those relationships grow, the computation required to answer certain permission questions can grow with them.
AI compounds the problem. An AI agent may need to search millions of documents. A RAG pipeline may need to evaluate permissions across enormous datasets. An enterprise application may have thousands of users accessing millions of resources through complex organizational relationships.
Authorization systems aren't making one authorization decision. They're making millions or billions of them. At that scale, even small amounts of authorization latency can become a meaningful constraint on the entire system.
The goal isn't simply to make one authorization check faster. It is to make authorization capable of scaling with the application or agent platform.
Precomputing Authorization Checks to Help with Latency
Traditionally, authorization decisions are computed when an application asks for them.
That works well for many workloads. But when the underlying relationship graph becomes large and the questions become complex, repeatedly performing the same expensive computations can introduce a performance ceiling. Caching can only help so much and has no bearing on p99 latency.
Materialize changes that model. Instead of waiting until a request arrives to perform every expensive computation, Materialize precomputes the results of resource-intensive permission queries and keeps those results continuously updated.
When the application needs an answer, it can retrieve the precomputed result instead of requiring the authorization system to reconstruct the answer from scratch.
This means authorization can handle dramatically higher request volumes without requiring every request to carry the full computational cost of the underlying relationship graph.
Scaling authorization without sacrificing
What happens when permissions change? Materialize is designed to keep its results current.
It periodically recomputes its view from a snapshot and consumes a live stream of relationship changes between snapshots. As relationships change, those changes are incorporated into the materialized view. This allows Materialize to deliver the performance advantages of precomputation while preserving the correctness and consistency required for production authorization.
Materialize is built to remove the authorization performance ceiling across increasingly demanding workloads.
Accelerate the critical-path to near-instant results
Materialize responds within single-digit milliseconds, helping applications handle high request volumes without making authorization a bottleneck.
Complex models at enterprise scale
Organizations can maintain sophisticated relationship-based authorization models without compromising in their design as users, resources, and relationships grow.
AI workloads without artificial limits
Agents and RAG systems can operate across larger datasets and more complex permission structures without requiring authorization to be simplified or bypassed.
Production-proven
Materialize has supported production workloads with billions of relationships for select customers since 2024.
Managed scale
As a fully supported service of the AuthZed Platform, Materialize provides the infrastructure required to scale authorization without requiring teams to operate another distributed system themselves.
Availability and pricing
AuthZed Materialize is generally available today for AuthZed Dedicated.
Existing AuthZed Dedicated customers can enable Materialize against their current commitment. Contact AuthZed to learn more.