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Access Control and Security

Orkes Conductor provides a robust role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism for individual users and applications that use Conductor APIs. Conductor’s RBAC ensures fine-grained access to the following metadata resources:

  • Workflows
  • Tasks
  • Secrets
  • Environment variables
  • Integrations
  • Prompts
  • User forms
  • Event handlers
  • Schedules
  • Webhooks
  • Domains

Get started with using Orkes’ RBAC suite by understanding what are users, groups, applications, tags, roles, and permissions.

Users​

A user represents a human user that interacts with Conductor. Users are authenticated using SSO providers or email/password. Each user has one or more roles assigned to them.

Groups​

A group is a set of users. Groups are a way to quickly share permissions among multiple users.

Each Conductor group can be associated with one or more roles. Groups can also be assigned a set of permissions, which provides access to specific Conductor resources. When a user is added to a group, the user automatically inherits the group's roles and permissions. Likewise, when a user is removed from a group, the roles and permissions are automatically removed from the user.

Applications​

An application represents an application that interacts with a Conductor server via APIs or SDKs. Applications can be assigned a set of permissions, which provides it with access to specific Conductor resources. Each application can also have one or more access key/secret pairs, which are used to grant access to Conductor SDK and API.

Tags​

A tag is a key-value pair that can be added to any metadata resource, such as a workflow, task, schedule, secret, and so on.

Tags serve as a useful shorthand for sharing permissions across many resources or users. When you grant tag permissions to a group or application, it provides access to all resources containing that tag.

Roles​

A role in Conductor represents a set of broad-level, default permissions to resources. Roles can be assigned to a user, group, or application.

If multiple roles are granted, they will have all granted role-level permissions. For example, a group with both User and Workflow Manager roles can not only create their own workflows, but also read all workflows in the cluster.

RoleDescription
UserRegular user. Can only access resources that they created.
Read Only UserCan access all metadata and workflows in the system as read-only. Cannot modify or execute workflows.

Note: Read Only Users cannot read secret values.
Workflow ManagerCan view and execute all workflows in the system.
Metadata ManagerCan read, update, and delete all metadata in the system.
AdminSuperuser. Full access to the system and resources. Can manage users and groups.

Permissions​

Besides the role-based permissions, you can add granular permissions to groups or applications. These permissions grant access to specific resources:

  • Workflows
  • Tasks
  • Secrets
  • Environment variables
  • Tags
  • Domains
  • Integrations
  • Prompts

Unlike other permission targets, tags and domains provide bulk access to multiple resources. Tags can be used to grant resources across almost every resource type. When you grant access for a tag “x”, all resources with the tag “x” will be made available to the group or application.

Domain is used to grant access to all tasks under a particular domain. This is useful for mass-granting a worker application to execute all tasks under a specific domain, instead of having to add individual tasks and specifying its domain. Refer to Routing Tasks to learn more about domain mappings.

Permission stacking​

These granular permissions provide additional access on top of the user’s or application’s role-based permissions. For example, even though default users can only access their own resources, they can also access other resources shared at the group level.

Guides for access control​