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SpiceDB Documentation

Welcome to the official documentation for the SpiceDB ecosystem.

• New? Follow our first steps guide
• Got questions? Our FAQ has answers

What is SpiceDB?

SpiceDB is an open-source, Google Zanzibar-inspired database system for real-time, security-critical application permissions.

Developers create a schema that models their application's resources and permissions, and then use client libraries to insert relationships or check permissions in their applications.

Building modern authorization from scratch is non-trivial and requires years of development from domain experts. Until SpiceDB, the only developers with access to these workflows were employed by massive tech companies.

Now we have a community organized around sharing this technology so the entire industry can benefit.

INFO

In some scenarios, SpiceDB can be challenging to operate because it is a critical, low-latency, distributed system. For folks interested in managed SpiceDB services and enterprise functionality, there are AuthZed's products.

SpiceDB History

The founders left Red Hat (which had acquired their previous company CoreOS) in August 2020. They created project Arrakis, the first API-complete Zanzibar implementation in Python, and demonstrated it during their Y Combinator application in September 2020. The project was rewritten in Go as "Caladan" in March 2021, then open-sourced as SpiceDB in September 2021.

You can also read the history of Google's Zanzibar project, the spiritual predecessor and inspiration for SpiceDB.

SpiceDB Features

Features that distinguish SpiceDB from other systems include:

• Expressive APIs: gRPC and HTTP/JSON APIs for checking permissions, listing access, and powering devtools
• Distributed Architecture: A distributed, parallel graph engine faithful to the architecture described in Google's Zanzibar paper
• Flexible Consistency: A flexible consistency model configurable per-request with resistance to the "New Enemy Problem"
• Schema Language: An expressive schema language with a playground and CI/CD integrations for validation and integration testing
• Pluggable Storage: A pluggable storage system supporting in-memory, Spanner, CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, and MySQL
• Deep Observability: Prometheus metrics, pprof profiles, structured logging, and OpenTelemetry tracing