Jeff Patzer

SAML has a bit of a reputation. For many developers, it lives in that shadowy corner of the B2B internet where XML still rules and stack traces seem to go on forever. If you've ever had the misfortune of debugging a malformed <Assertion>, you know the pain. But here's the thing: it doesn't have to be a nightmare.

At Phase Two, we provide managed hosting and enterprise support for Keycloak, a leading open-source Identity and Access Management platform. And while OIDC has become the default for most modern applications, SAML is still alive and well—especially in enterprise environments.

This post is a gentle (and opinionated) introduction to what SAML is, how it works, and why it still matters particularly if you're implementing SAML SSO in Keycloak.

Why consider Phase Two for your Managed Keycloak Provider​

When it comes to identity and access management, Keycloak has established itself as the go-to open-source solution for authentication, authorization, and user management. However, successfully integrating and maintaining Keycloak requires more than just hosting—it requires expertise. That’s where the difference between Phase Two and other hosting providers becomes clear.

In this post, we’ll explore why Phase Two should be in strong consideration for your Managed Keycloak provider, especially when compared to providers like CloudIAM, Elest.io, and Servana, who focus solely on hosting the standard build of Keycloak.

Part 4: Cost-Effectiveness of Open Source​

At the heart of every startup's decision-making process lies the bottom line. We’re in an economy where cost-cutting measures are being taken across organizations, and many companies are starting to ask why their identity stack is such an outsized drag on their margins. Keycloak presents a compelling case with its open-source nature. Unlike proprietary IAM solutions that come with hefty price tags and recurring subscription fees, Keycloak offers a cost-effective alternative without compromising on features or security.

By leveraging Keycloak, startups can significantly reduce their operational expenses, channeling those resources into core business activities such as product development and market expansion. Moreover, the open-source community surrounding Keycloak ensures continuous improvement and innovation, all without the burden of additional licensing costs.

Overview​

A multi-tenant application is a software architecture where a single instance of an application serves multiple, distinct customer groups or “tenants.” Each tenant, often representing an organization or user group, shares the same underlying infrastructure and codebase but operates within its own securely isolated environment. This allows each tenant to have individualized data, configurations, and sometimes even unique customizations, while benefiting from a shared platform that reduces overall resource demands and maintenance. Multi-tenancy is commonly used in SaaS (Software as a Service) applications, enabling businesses to scale efficiently, lower costs, and streamline updates while ensuring that each tenant’s data and settings remain private and distinct from others within the same application. This approach is particularly valuable in enterprise applications, where companies may need to provide access to different organizations, departments, or customer groups within a single solution.

Keycloak and Native Applications​

Native applications for iOS, Android, and other platforms can integrate with Keycloak to provide secure, centralized authentication and authorization services. By utilizing Keycloak, these applications can streamline the user login experience through various protocols such as OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, which Keycloak natively supports. With Keycloak, mobile applications can handle user sign-in, token management, and session handling securely, ensuring user identities are managed consistently across devices and platforms. This setup enables native applications to offload the complexities of authentication to Keycloak, allowing seamless integrations with features like Single Sign-On (SSO), social logins, and multi-factor authentication, while developers can focus on app functionality rather than handling sensitive user data directly. Additionally, Keycloak’s support for fine-grained access control and roles ensures that native apps can manage user permissions efficiently, creating a robust foundation for secure, scalable mobile applications.

Our pal over at Keycloakify has been working on creating a simple OpenId Connect (OIDC) library called, OIDC Spa. As with Joseph's usual approach to user friendliness, OIDC SPA simplifies a lot of the integration work than can come with adding an Authentication and Authorization layer to your application. Follow along as we show you how to integrate OIDC SPA with a Phase Two's free Keycloak instance.

Phase Two has long been big fans of Keycloakify. The work being done by Joseph Garrone is in our opinion some of the best user-focused work in the Keycloak community. Keycloakify brings the ability to theme the Keycloak frontend applications: Login, Account, Admin(coming) using modern toolsets like React or Angular and theming systems like Tailwind or Material-UI. Keycloakify allows you to build quickly and deploy themes to your Keycloak installation in a manner that the existing Keycloak toolset (ftl templates) does not.

In this article we'll be using Keycloak to quickly secure a Angular application with user management and single sign on (SSO) using the open source IAMs Keycloak for Authentication and Authorization. We will demonstrate the integration by securing a page for logged-in users. This quickly provides a jump-off point to more complex integrations.

An exciting new feature has been added to Phase Two Organizations Extension! Organizations now support shared Identity Providers (IdPs) for mapping multiple organizations to a single IDP. This feature is especially useful for organizations that have multiple organizations that need to share the same IDP.

Since we first released our (most) popular Keycloak extension, Keycloak Organizations (Orgs) and made it available as open source on Github, the Keycloak maintainers have decided to build into native organization support.

This begs the question? What is different between Keycloak's upcoming organizations feature and the Phase Two Organization Extension?