[HN Gopher] WorkOS - Building blocks for quickly adding enterpri... ___________________________________________________________________ WorkOS - Building blocks for quickly adding enterprise features to an app Author : zenorocha Score : 93 points Date : 2022-05-12 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (workos.com) (TXT) w3m dump (workos.com) | cgijoe wrote: | Anyone know how this compares to Auth0? I like Auth0 because it's | free for up to 7K active users. WorkOS seems much more expensive | out of the gate ($49 per "connection"?). | rawfan wrote: | I applaud WorkOS for the idea (even if I also hate the name). The | sheer amount of externally developed apps that don't manage to | authenticate to our IdP is staggering. I've had a dozen calls | with developer teams, walking them step by step through the OIDC | flow and they still can't manage to implement it. | | I fail to understand why this is so hard for so many companies. | It's really not rocket science. | jjmorrison wrote: | What a waste of a sweet domain name | ezzato wrote: | So true. | phren0logy wrote: | The signup page mentions using Slack for OAuth, but I don't see | that option when I'm trying to set up an SSO integration. I | wonder if that's coming or no long available? | zenorocha wrote: | I couldn't find any mention to Slack for OAuth in the signup | page. Where did you see that? | phren0logy wrote: | Either I was hallucinating or it's no longer there. I could | have sworn I saw it somewhere between the link to the home | page and signing up, but I can't find it now. Will update if | it turns up, but apologies for any confusion. | barryhennessy wrote: | I love the idea, and can definitely see the need. | | _But_ I always come to the same question with services that | provide auth and user management: You pay a lot of money for | someone _else_ to own critical information about your customers. | What happens if you want to move away and use a different /your | own/your customers own service? | | Your customer data (at least login) lives in WorkOS' database. | How do you get it out? How much does that cost? Are there | contractual guarantees around that? | | The same goes for your customers integration points. If the | customer has to do any setup to integrate WorkOs for your app | then moving away would involve them making changes. Not | necessarily an easy thing to manage. | | Not to be negative: I'd be happy to hear that WorkOS have great | processes and guarantees around this. | dubswithus wrote: | Is using their API really any easier than using Rails gems? | Some gems are more mature than others but usually it's easy to | drop them in and configure. | | They claim SSO takes months to implement without their product. | Is that true? | jaywalk wrote: | It would probably take months to implement SSO with all of | the flexibility and ease of use they offer, mainly just | because of the built-in integrations with so many providers. | The price is pretty steep though, so this would really only | be used by the big bucks Enterprise Software(tm) guys. | rawfan wrote: | It's not. Implementing the OIDC flow from scratch takes half | a day to get working and maybe a week to polish. Using | available libraries you can do it way faster of course. | zenorocha wrote: | WorkOS doesn't really own the user management database. It's | more like an agnostic API to connect with multiple IdPs through | protocols like SAML and OIDC. Identity providers such as Okta, | OneLogin, and Azure AD are the ones responsible for storing | that data. | sixwing wrote: | i can't count the number of products i've worked on or adjacent | to that have gained some traction, started to scale... and hit a | brick wall when wanting to access the enterprise market. far too | often, these projects end up stopping most core feature work to | add hacky versions of whatever's required to close that | enterprise sales gap. they slow velocity while incurring tech | debt. | | a SaaS product that offers some developer-friendly ways to drop | these capabilities into your system could be a huge win for | companies at that inflection point. | paxys wrote: | While I agree, an SSO login wall is really the most trivial of | these enterprise features to implement. Even the most basic | SaaS app out there supports it already, and there are enough | libraries in every language you can use. So while WorkOS might | make things easier in that area, it won't be a game changer, at | least not with its current feature set. | | Start talking about compliance with a hundred different | standards (ISO/IEC, SOC, CSA, GDPR, APEC, HIPAA, FINRA, | FedRAMP), data residency, eDiscovery, audit logging, RBAC, | invoicing, uptime SLAs, analytics, MDM, disabling features and | your customers will be a LOT more interested. | rawfan wrote: | I've seen a SaaS app team who couldn't implement OIDC because | their login screen is actually some kind of maven plugin (so | they don't control it). They can't move to the latest version | of that plugin that does supports OIDC, because that needs | the latest Maven version. They're using a BPE (process | engine), though, that is end-of-life and won't work with the | latest Maven. | | They're in dependency hell. So we put their whole app behind | a proxy that does our SSO. | PointyDog wrote: | Apologies if not the right place for this feedback, but the | careers page does not work properly on Firefox 100/Linux - | clicking any opening does nothing. | | I work heavily with enterprise products. In my experience, when | you're selling an enterprise-ready product it's a good idea to QA | all public-facing code, even sections of a public website. | | This is because I have found many enterprise customers are more | interested in maintenance (which can be pre-assessed by looking | at support and QA experiences) than they are the actual product. | demarq wrote: | So, an enterprise authentication service. | spicybright wrote: | It's not a big deal, but I find it annoying when people call | something an OS when it's not an operating system. Like how | xfinity has their "Entertainment Operating System" or whatever it | is. | jaywalk wrote: | Sure Comcast's "X1 Entertainment Operating System" is | technically just a suite of applications that run on top of an | actual OS, but at least it comprises everything an end user | will interact with. It's much closer to an OS than WorkOS, | that's for sure. | usrn wrote: | That's arguably not too different from Android. | jaywalk wrote: | That's a great point, actually. | michaelsalim wrote: | You're not the only one. It's blatant false advertising and | downplays the complexity of an actual OS. | | Another example is monday.com claiming to be a "work OS" | [deleted] | demarq wrote: | Imagine you are a customer looking for an authentication | solution to help you integrate with customer enterprise | systems. | | Were you going to search for work OS? No you're going to pick | from one of the words above. | | I think inflating a product by obscuring it behind grandiose | facades is a rookie marketing mistake. | | Unless your apple and need a name for a new Color or something. | NoraCodes wrote: | I think it's a big deal. I keep seeing things like that and | getting kind of excited - "is this a new corporate-supported | Linux distro? something cooler?" - and it never is. It sucks. | linux2647 wrote: | $WORK's corporate values, etc are distilled into an "OS". | It's been that way since it was a startup, but I still find | calling it an "OS" weird. | lawrencevillain wrote: | Speaking of weird ways to name something, why did you write | it as $WORK? It doesn't look like it's publicly traded. | [deleted] | [deleted] | blooalien wrote: | To a programmer or scripter, an uppercase $WORD starting | with a dollar sign often denotes a variable. Thus, $WORK | could denote any sort of work, or if you're religious, | you might worship a $DIETY (but which one we don't know | without asking, so it's "variable" information). | pavlov wrote: | Sadly this script that depends on a supreme being will | probably break in production because the correct spelling | is $DEITY... | | I guess supernatural dependencies are frowned upon these | days anyway. | netizen-936824 wrote: | I don't understand how you can say | | >values, etc are distilled into an "OS". | | When its literally not an Operating System. Its an | application, no? It runs in user space on top of a real | Operating System | hermitdev wrote: | I agree. Words matter and have specific meanings. I'm tired | of words being subverted for other purposes. Like "chemical | free". So, you're telling me it contains...nothing? Or | organic foods which has absolutely nothing to do with the | meaning of organic from a chemistry standpoint. Conflating | terms like this is purposeful misinformation with the intent | to confuse and mislead (usually so you can charge more | because the consumer thinks they're getting something | different than what they're actually being peddled). The most | charitable I could call it would be anti-consumer. | | From a cursory look at WorkOS, it's not an OS. It's at best | an app framework. | akvadrako wrote: | And what do you think an operating system is? | | It doesn't need to run on hardware, as most Linux-based OSes | run on hypervisors. It doesn't need to have multitasking, since | DOS is clearly an OS. I would say it's just something that runs | apps. | endofreach wrote: | Yeah, it should be part of their slogan, if even at all. But | ,,like a OS for X" to explain is fine. | yjftsjthsd-h wrote: | For bonus points, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS | was a thing that _was_ an OS - when I first saw the title I | thought of that first. | drcongo wrote: | I'm glad the submission title has been updated, as from the page | I had no idea what this was. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-12 23:02 UTC)