Platform Mesh

IAM service

Purpose

The IAM service is a GraphQL-based identity and access management service for Platform Mesh. It is composed of two integrated layers:

The service consumes per-organization OpenFGA stores provisioned by the Security operator, writes role-assignment tuples for IAM workflows, and exposes IAM operations consumed by the Portal and other Platform Mesh components. It is the runtime peer of the Account operator for identity and access-management workflows.

Runtime role

The IAM service does not own Store lifecycle. It looks up the organization’s OpenFGA store by name, writes role-assignment tuples, and evaluates tuples through OpenFGA. The Store CRD and authorization model are reconciled by the Security operator.

All routing goes through a GraphQL API. Requests pass through a kcp middleware layer that injects user context from the JWT token, then reach resolvers protected by an @Authorized directive that evaluates OpenFGA tuples before returning data.

GraphQL Request
    ↓
kcp middleware (injects user context from JWT)
    ↓
GraphQL Resolver (@Authorized directive)
    ↓
OpenFGA tuple evaluation + Keycloak user enrichment
    ↓
Response

Role model — two roles are defined per resource scope:

Role Description
Owner Full access to all resources within the account
Member Limited access; can view and interact but cannot administrate

No traditional database — authorization state is stored exclusively as OpenFGA tuples, enabling distributed authorization decisions and consistency through kcp coordination.

Technology stack

Component Technology
Language Go 1.26+
API GraphQL (schema-first via gqlgen)
Authorization OpenFGA (gRPC)
Identity provider Keycloak (OIDC / OAuth2)
Multi-cluster kcp (kcp-dev controller-runtime fork)
Observability OpenTelemetry + zerolog
Container Distroless static binary, non-root (UID 1001)

Configuration

Variable Purpose
KUBECONFIG Path to the Kubernetes / kcp cluster config
KEYCLOAK_CLIENT_SECRET Keycloak OAuth2 client secret (environment only — never pass via CLI args)

Copy .env.sample to .env and populate the values before running locally.

Repository