Building Better IAM with a Scale-Out, OLTP Database

ZITADEL is a modern cloud-native IAM platform that integrates authentication and authorization needs without the need for running custom code. It was built to address the gaps in existing identity and access management platforms, such as weak audit trails, high costs, and difficulty scaling across regions and clouds. The platform relies on CockroachDB due to its ability to handle Event Sourcing (ES) and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), strong consistency, great availability guarantees, cloud-native design, easy automation, and horizontal scalability. ZITADEL is currently deployed in parallel on GCP and Cloudscale, both providers with data centers in Switzerland. The future of identity and access management includes features like changefeeds for accelerating backend processes and geo-partitioning to allow customers to choose where their data is stored.