Austin TX, April 14th, 2020 — While some commercial authentication systems can perform millions of authentications per day, Gluu has shown that its open source identity platform, using Couchbase as its database, can perform over a billion authentications per day.
This was made possible by advances in cloud native technology and hosted Kubernetes services like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Not only has Gluu shown unprecedented login throughput, but importantly, the capacity auto-scales quickly enough to cost effectively meet demand, without pre-provisioning unnecessary capacity.
Ultimately, it took between 100 and 500 container pods to accomplish the goal, depending on which authentication flow was tested (web versus API). In practice, Gluu proved that any throughput could be achieved using the auto-scaling features of its Kubernetes distribution. Gluu, Couchbase, and cloud native technology stacks make this type of performance attainable by small operational teams for the first time.
“For the massive scale required by cloud authentication services, the question is how to manage capacity cost-effectively,” said CEO Mike Schwartz, CEO of Gluu. “If your identity service can’t take advantage of new cloud native technologies, you can’t just-in-time provision the resources with low operational impact. As the world’s most comprehensive open source implementation of OpenID Connect, we’re thrilled to first achieve this important performance milestone. You can’t do this kind of stuff if you’re using old backends like relational databases or LDAP. Couchbase was an essential partner in our quest to build the world’s fastest authorization platform.”
“We are excited to not only continue, but to strengthen our long-standing partnership with Gluu,” said Matt McDonough, Vice President of Business Development at Couchbase. “Through Couchbase and Gluu’s cloud native approach, we’ve been able to split services and workloads to support auto-scaling easily enough to surpass the 1B authentications in a single day milestone. Together, we will continue to optimize the Couchbase platform along with Gluu’s robust, industry-proven solution for single sign-on and two-factor authentication to deliver the next billion authentications in a day.”
An early adopter of the new cloud platform is IDEMIA. “When selecting a platform for our next generation authentication service we knew aligning with cloud native principles would enable us to achieve our scale requirements today and in the future. We serve millions of customers a day and we need to quickly scale up (and down) to meet demand. Although we evaluated all of the options, building on an open source infrastructure stack was also preferred,” said Jeff Corrigan, Principal Software Engineer, CISSP, CIPT.
Since 2009, organizations around the world have trusted Gluu for large-scale, high-security identity & access management (IAM). Gluu’s comprehensive open source platform provides industry-leading solutions for web and mobile single sign-on (SSO), two-factor authentication (2FA), and API access management. Built on open web standards like OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and WebAuthn (FIDO), customers choose Gluu for performant, compliant and modern authentication, authorization, federation and hybrid cloud identity.
About IDEMIA
IDEMIA, the global leader in Augmented Identity, provides a trusted environment enabling citizens and consumers alike to perform their daily critical activities (such as pay, connect and travel), in the physical as well as digital space. Securing our identity has become mission critical in the world we live in today. By standing for Augmented Identity, an identity that ensures privacy and trust and guarantees secure, authenticated and verifiable transactions, we reinvent the way we think, produce, use and protect one of our greatest assets – our identity – whether for individuals
or for objects, whenever and wherever security matters. We provide Augmented Identity for international clients from Financial, Telecom, Identity, Public Security and IoT sectors. With 13,000 employees around the world, IDEMIA serves clients in 180 countries. For more information, visit www.idemia.com / Follow @IdemiaGroup on Twitter
About Couchbase
Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase provides an enterprise-class, multicloud to edge database that offers the robust capabilities required for business-critical applications on a highly scalable and available platform. As a distributed cloud-native database, Couchbase runs in modern dynamic environments and on any cloud, either customer-managed or fully managed as-a-service. Couchbase is built on open standards, combining the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases. Couchbase has become pervasive in our everyday lives; our customers include industry leaders Amadeus, American Express, Carrefour, Cisco, Comcast/Sky, Disney, eBay, LinkedIn, Marriott, Tesco, Tommy Hilfiger, United, Verizon, as well as hundreds of other household names. For more information, visit www.couchbase.com
About Gluu
Since 2009, organizations around the world have trusted Gluu for large-scale, high-security identity & access management (IAM). Gluu’s comprehensive open source platform provides industry-leading solutions for web and mobile single sign-on (SSO), two-factor authentication (2FA), and API access management. Built on open web standards like OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, WebAuthn (FIDO), and UMA, customers choose Gluu for performant, compliant and modern authentication, authorization, federation and hybrid cloud identity.
For detailed technical information on how this benchmark was achieved, see the Gluu documentation: https://gluu.co/1b-howto