Chapter 1  -  The Problem: Authorization in Microservices Is Still Too Coupled

The Security Trade-Off of Microservices Among the many promised benefits of migrating from monolithic applications to microservices — scalability, independent deployability, and team autonomy — one challenge is often underestimated: Securing many decoupled services is significantly harder than securing a single application. Enterprise environments are already complex. Internal governance policies, client requirements, regulatory compliance, and security standards impose strict constraints on system design. When such constraints meet distributed architectures, complexity increases rapidly. To cope with these demands, organizations frequently develop customized security solutions — including self-designed authorization protocols and, in some cases, even self-built authentication mechanisms. Custom solutions may solve immediate problems, but they often slow down long-term change and innovation. Authentication vs. Authorization — Still Confused in Practice Two of the most fundamental conce