Securing Your Services

So far in this book, all the interactions between services were done without any form of authentication or authorization; each HTTP request would happily return a result. This cannot happen in production for two simple reasons: we need to know who is calling the service (authentication), and we need to make sure that the caller is allowed to perform the call (authorization). For instance, we probably don't want an anonymous caller to delete entries in a database.

In a monolithic web application, simple authentication can happen with a login form, and once the user is identified a cookie is set with a session identifier so that the client and server can collaborate on all subsequent requests. In a microservice-based architecture, we cannot use this scheme everywhere because services are not users and won't use web forms for authentication. We need a way to accept or reject calls between services automatically.

The OAuth2 authorization protocol...