ZITADEL: Customer portal for Identity Experience Platform

What actually is an IAM?

In the past, login systems and user management systems were programmed individually for each application. Then the first identity access management systems came along and made life in software development much easier. After many years of confusion, the world was almost able to agree on a universal and standardized authentication protocol. Even if OpenID Connect is not yet being used consistently and correctly by everyone involved.

The project

In recent years, the team behind ZITADEL has been able to celebrate a number of successes. As always in the software world, at some point it was time for a general overhaul. The new concept was to create completely separate, independent IAM instances for each customer. The team at ZITADEL programmed the new IAM system and a system API to manage these instances. Meanwhile, we took care of the customer portal for managing these instances and payment information.

The challenge

Develop a customer portal to manage a system while the system to be managed is also still under construction. Connecting the many peripheral systems in the right order.

The complex world of systems

When you create your IAM instance at ZITADEL, a lot happens in the background. A Mailjet account, a Stripe account, the instance of course, an admin user in this instance, a certificate at Google Cloud for your domain and more.

The audience

A smooth onboarding process as the ultimate goal. Software engineers as a target persona: a difficult audience to satisfy. If it doesn't work, they simply try the next product.

Our solution

Components First! Wir haben erstmal mit einem Designsystem gestartet. Sind die einzelnen Bausteine visuell vorhanden, ist es nachher einfacher, eine einheitliche und funktinierende Oberfläche zu gestalten. Danach haben wir ein Umsystem nach dem anderen angehängt, in engem Austausch mit dem Team bei ZITADEL, das gleichzeitig die von uns benötigte ZITADEL-System-API aus dem Boden gestampft hat.

Chicken egg

An administration platform for user administration also needs its own user administration. Right? Who else is going to manage the users for the user management platform? That may sound like a bad joke. But it's not that easy to solve and has repeatedly caused confused looks and funny situations during project meetings.

Under the hood

Technology

We implemented the platform with Next.js and Tailwind. Storybook was used for the component library.

API(s)

Many peripheral systems, many APIs. We have connected gRPC, REST and GraphQL interfaces.

Deployment

With Github Actions and Terraform on the Google Cloud Serverlesss infrastructure.