Moving Authorization Out of Your App Code: If-Statements vs. Cerbos vs. SpiceDB

DevOps Daily built one permission model three ways (if-statements, Cerbos, SpiceDB), grew it over four steps, and checked each against 84 hand-written decisions. On a Raspberry Pi 4 with 10,000 documents, median single checks took 0.14 ms, 3.8 ms and 10.8 ms. A member's list took 4.4 ms in SQL, 11.9–31.6 ms via Cerbos and 77–404 ms via SpiceDB. Every design still needed application changes for a late rule. The timings come from one setup and the Cerbos–SpiceDB timing figures have no independent source.