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What is Google Zanzibar?

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Zanzibar is Google's purpose-built authorization system. It's a centralized authorization database built to take authorization queries from high-traffic apps and return authorization decisions. An instance of Zanzibar hosts a list of permissions and responds to queries from many apps. Google published a paper on their global authorization system that they presented at 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference and it has since become a popular resource for developers who are building authorization services. Watch our video that discusses the core design decisions of Zanzibar and its implications for your applications. A Zanzibar instance is made up of a cluster of servers, a distributed SQL database, an indexing system, a snapshotting system, and a periodic jobs system. Google has many high-traffic apps, like Search, Docs, Sheets, and Gmail. Google accounts are shared between those systems, so authorization decisions (that is, what actions a Google account can take) need to be coordinated

What is Google Zanzibar? Your employees ignore 96% of their permissions. Agents won't. → Read the research Company Book a demo Table of Contents ‍ ‍ Why did Google develop Zanzibar for access control? How does Google Zanzibar solve for authorization? ‍ Correctness ‍ Speed and availability ‍ Scale What does Google Zanzibar do well? What doesn't Google Zanzibar do? Looking for an authorization service? Related Reads ‍ ‍ Authorization for the rest of us Google Zanzibar Isn't Flexible ‍ ‍ What is Google Zanzibar? by Hazal Mestci Last updated: December 16, 2025 Published: April 29, 2022 Zanzibar is

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