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An Introduction to Google Zanzibar and Relationship ...
authzed.com
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One of Zanzibar's most useful features is its ability to enable authorization checks across different Google products. For example, when you're composing an email in Gmail and attach a link to a Google Drive document, Gmail can check whether your email recipients have access to that document. If they don't, Gmail can warn you and offer to grant them access. “This cross-product integration is only possible because all Google services use the same authorization system with consistent APIs and data models.” To understand why Google invested in building Zanzibar, it helps to understand the problems that most organizations encounter as their software systems grow in complexity. Google's challenges were similar to what many companies face today, just at a much larger scale.