Overview

For many years, network applications have being built using various architectural patterns, the commonest and most adopted in the last few decades being the Monolith architecture. While this easy to design, develop, and, deploy, the architectural style is riddled with the challenge of horizontal scaling and adopting new and more performant technologies as need arise.

In 2012, the word Microservices was coined to connote an architectural style of building systems as an aggregate of many loosely coupled sub-systems which are independently deployable, easier to test, scale, and, update. This solve the challenge poised by the Monolithic style of building systems.

Interestingly, the Microservice style is not without its own challenge, one of such being authorization and authentication especially in user-facing applications.

Raccoon is an Apache 2.0 licensed research project that explores various authorization and authentication strategies for Microservices with a primal focus on Software As A Service

Why Raccoon?

Raccoon is kind of mammal which could be found almost anywhere in the world. Research has shown that Racoons are very intelligent than an average cat or dog. They are also cunning and interestingly mischievous.

The name of the project is inspired of this special ability of racoons mention - Microservices are interesting, they solves a lot of problem but they can also be "cunning" or somewhat "mischievou"s to implement, at least for a some just getting started, thus, the name Raccoon!