…with tag team partners STS for SAML and the VDS (Virtual Directory Server) for LDAP?
So I’ve taken Jackson‘s advice and have been reading Microsoft’s “Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control”. While most of it has been things I’ve heard before, the formulation of the ideas the way Microsoft wants to present them to their favorite audience, developers, is very interesting.
The thing that caught my eye and inspired a whole lot of conversation, lightbulbs for me and this post was a quote very early on:
“ADFS has a rule engine that makes it easy to extract LDAP attributes from the user’s record in Active Directory and its cousin, Lightweight Directory Services. ADFS also allows you to add rules that include arbitrary SQL statements so that you can extract user data out of your own custom SQL database. You can extend ADFS to add other stores. This is useful because, in many companies, a user’s identity is often fragmented. ADFS hides this fragmentation. Your claims-based applications won’t break if you decide to move data around between stores.” (from page 6)
Described like this, the STS sounds a heck of a lot like a VDS. So I asked many of the Quest big brains what they thought of the quote and what the quote made me think. I was quickly told that this was silly since the models for an STS and VDS are so different. Some of their points were:
- STS is a push model where users show up at the applications with claims ready and VDS is a pull model where the application needs to go get the information
- The VDS approach is about applications using data from multiple sources without modifying the application while the ADFS + WIF approach is about teaching the application to consume claims natively by modifying it
- The STS and SAML approaches wraps the claims, the identity data, into the authentication operation while the VDS approach simply exposes a service for the application to use through the applications operations.
Somewhere in the midst of this discussion, a big gear clicked into place. I saw something I bet many, many have seen before – but it was new to me. Microsoft and Oracle were really going head to head in identity for applications. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that Microsoft and Oracle would compete. But that does seem to be what’s happening. You see, the VDS had always been in this spot on my mental whiteboard between the applications and the multiple sources of identity data as an abstraction layer. The STS was somewhere on that mental whiteboard, but it wasn’t there. Now I’d been clearly shown that it could be moved in front of the VDS, or even be moved to replace the VDS. Of course, much depends on the use cases. The STS can’t really do everything the VDS does and vice versa. But I think it’s fair to say that Oracle is betting on people like me who see with an application architect’s eye and try to make the current generation of revenue generating applications do their work better and faster. Microsoft is betting on it’s excellent developer community and credibility to propel the next generation of all applications into a claims based, STS dependent world.
That battle would seem to pit SAML and LDAP against each other, each with one of the largest tech giants in it’s corner. In reality, I doubt it will be anything so dramatic. But before this conversation, I didn’t even see the potential for that battle. It’s amazing how many latent hostilities to some approaches seem clear to me now. I don’t even think some of the people who were hostile realized why. But there are deep mechanisms at work in the respective communities involved that are forming opinions that will likely solidify into “Linux vs Windows Server” style opinion wars soon enough. Here I thought all this good will about interoperability in identity could last forever. Silly me.