Since our release about basing Phase Two on the Keycloak Open Source Identity and Access Management system, and our commitment to keeping our core extensions open source, we've received positive feedback from customers and interest from the the Keycloak community.

We've noticed that support forums for Keycloak have many questions and requests around just getting started. Even though the software is mature, open source, and has a helpful user community, just spinning up an environment and trying it out can be puzzling for first-time users. It's pretty clear that a lot of people just give up, because they can't get a server running, let alone configure their first realm[^1].

Following the initial release of Phase Two's authentication and SSO tools 3 months ago, we had a warm reception by several early- to mid- stage SaaS companies. The message was consistent. SSO was a key barrier to unlocking enterprise customers, and we had made it much easier to quickly integrate the alphabet-soup of enterprise identity providers, including Auth0, Okta, and many others.

After building and working for startups and technology companies for almost 25 years, I found myself having a sense of déjà-vu.

Had I really built the same features and functionality over and over?