At the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), we celebrate organizations that turn cloud native technologies into real-world impact. AuthZed, a CNCF Silver member, is one such story—a company built from the ground up on open source, community-driven innovation.
From the start, AuthZed set out to build a global-scale authorization platform entirely on CNCF projects like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and gRPC. The result: a scalable, observable, and high-performance system that works seamlessly across environments.
In this blog, cofounder Jimmy Zelinskie shares how deep roots in the cloud native ecosystem—from building Quay.io to shaping the Operator Framework—shaped AuthZed’s architecture. Their story is more than a case study—it’s a model for modern infrastructure done right.
At AuthZed, CNCF technologies are more than just tools—they’re the foundation of everything we’ve built. From the very beginning, our entire product has been architected with CNCF projects at its core. Without this ecosystem, we simply wouldn’t be able to deliver our product effectively to customer environments in a consistent, reliable way.
The founders of AuthZed have been involved in the cloud native community since its early days. We created Quay.io as the first enterprise Docker registry before the term “cloud native” was widely adopted, and have contributed to Kubernetes, have acted as OCI maintainers, and helped shape the Operator Framework we know today. Our team has lived and breathed cloud native principles, so when it came time to build AuthZed, turning to these technologies felt natural.
The challenge: A lack of standards
Building a performant, reliable, and observable authorization service that functions consistently everywhere is inherently complex. Our background in the evolving cloud native space made it clear: legacy deployment and management methods, which lacked standardized APIs for orchestration, telemetry, and automated upgrades, simply couldn’t meet these demands effectively at scale. How could we ensure a globally-available, low-latency service, trace requests across distributed systems, and manage deployment lifecycles reliably without a common operational toolkit?
For AuthZed, adopting CNCF projects wasn’t just a “nice to have”- it was a foundational requirement defined by our architecture from the outset, addressing the inherent complexities of delivering highly-available authorization infrastructure at global scale. We are thankful we have always had cloud native technologies available to us since we discovered the Google Zanzibar paper, Google’s consistent global authorization system, and were inspired to create AuthZed to help enterprises solve authorization issues at scale.
The CNCF advantage: A cohesive, scalable ecosystem
The AuthZed core infrastructure relies on these essential CNCF projects.
Kubernetes provides a cloud-agnostic deployment platform, allowing us to package SpiceDB in containers and manage it predictably anywhere. We leverage the Operator pattern, drawing on our team’s early experience developing the first operators, to automate complex deployment and upgrade tasks, simplifying operations for both our SaaS offering and customer-managed instances.
OpenTelemetry gives us standard tooling needed to emit tracing, metrics, and logs, ensuring we can deliver meaningful insights and traceability into request flows and performance bottlenecks. Importantly, its vendor-neutral design ensures telemetry integrates easily with customers’ diverse monitoring tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, or DataDog.
gRPC serves as the high-throughput, low-latency backbone SpiceDB requires in order to handle complex authorization workloads at scale. We use it for internal service traffic and as the primary SpiceDB API, relying on its efficiency and the stable API contracts defined via Protobufs, which support clients across many languages.
Measurable impact: Enabling innovation at scale
Thanks to the CNCF ecosystem, not only were we able to build our product in the first place, but we’ve also been able to scale it to meet the needs of our customers. The broad industry adoption of these technologies has enabled us to deliver solutions that are performant, interoperable, and deeply aligned with our users’ existing infrastructure.
A final insight: Standardization drives success
One of the most valuable—yet often overlooked—benefits of CNCF technologies is the standardization they bring. Because our customers use the same tools and methodologies we do, diagnosing and resolving issues becomes dramatically easier for our support teams. This shared foundation accelerates troubleshooting, reduces friction, and ultimately leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.
At Authzed, CNCF technologies aren’t just part of our stack—they’re at the heart of our success.
Additional resources:
Building a managed database service with Kubernetes Operators
Running Low latency Workloads on Kubernetes
Have your own cloud native story to tell?
We’re always looking to spotlight innovative use cases, community contributions, and production success stories built on CNCF projects. If your organization is solving real-world problems with cloud native technologies, submit your story here and share your journey with the broader community.
Let’s continue building the future of cloud native—together. Submit your story here.