WHAT IS GOOGLE ZANZIBAR?

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Google Zanzibar is a globally distributed authorization system designed to address the complex access control needs of Google's software ecosystem. It combines the granularity of Access Control Lists (ACLs) with the simplicity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to make handling permissions simpler. By modeling permissions as data in a graph, Zanzibar allows for querying and derivation of relationships between objects. It uses standard functions like Read, Write, Watch, Check, and Expand to interact with the graph, and a tuple-based language to describe resources and relationships.