Your team built authorization in-house years ago. It worked then. Now you're hitting limits: performance problems at scale, features that take weeks to ship, bugs that expose data. Migrating feels risky, but staying put is costing you. Here's how teams make the switch.
Your legacy authorization system worked at 10,000 users but breaks at 100,000. Every new feature requires weeks of authorization work. Here are the warning signs:
Performance degrades as you grow. Permission checks slow down. Cron jobs fall behind. Users notice.
Every feature requires permission work. New role? New resource type? Each one means weeks of authorization code, testing, and debugging.
Authorization logic is everywhere. Scattered across services, duplicated in queries, hardcoded in application code.
You're afraid to change it. The person who built it left. The code is fragile. Features get delayed or descoped.
The result: engineering time wasted on maintaining infrastructure instead of building features. Deals lost because enterprise permissions aren't ready. Security incidents from authorization bugs.
Translate your current roles, resources, and relationships into SpiceDB schema. The Playground lets you test before committing. Most teams find their model actually gets simpler.
Write permissions to both systems. Compare results. AuthZed's consistency guarantees mean you can trust the answers. Discrepancies usually reveal bugs in the old system.
Route a percentage of permission checks to AuthZed. Monitor latency and correctness. Increase the percentage as confidence grows.
Once all reads go through AuthZed, stop writing to the old system. Remove the legacy code. Celebrate.
New permission types require schema changes, not code changes. Your whole roadmap can now become essentially different types of permissions features. That's all possible now.
No more performance tuning, query optimization, or caching workarounds. Authorization just works.
No more on-call for authorization infrastructure. No more debugging sync jobs. Engineers build product features instead of maintaining permission systems.
Need to add team-based access? Sharing? Time-limited permissions? Customer-managed roles? The schema supports it. No re-architecture required.
Talk to our team about migrating from your legacy system to AuthZed.