We build Ory on several guiding principles when it comes to our architecture design:
- Minimal dependencies
- Runs everywhere
- Scales without effort
- Minimize room for human and network errors
Ory's architecture is designed to run best on a Container Orchestration system such as Kubernetes, CloudFoundry, OpenShift, and similar projects. Binaries are small (5-15MB) and available for all popular processor types (ARM, AMD64, i386) and operating systems (FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, Windows) without system dependencies (Java, Node, Ruby, libxml, ...).
Ory Kratos is an API-first Identity and User Management system that is built according to cloud architecture best practices. It implements core use cases that almost every software application needs to deal with: Self-service Login and Registration, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA), Account Recovery and Verification, Profile, and Account Management.
Ory Hydra is an OpenID Certified™ OAuth2 and OpenID Connect Provider which easily connects to any existing identity system by writing a tiny "bridge" application. It gives absolute control over the user interface and user experience flows.
Ory Oathkeeper is a BeyondCorp/Zero Trust
Identity & Access Proxy (IAP) with configurable authentication, authorization,
and request mutation rules for your web services: Authenticate JWT, Access
Tokens, API Keys, mTLS; Check if the contained subject is allowed to perform the
request; Encode resulting content into custom headers (X-User-ID), JSON Web
Tokens and more!
Ory Keto is a policy decision point. It uses a set of access control policies, similar to AWS IAM Policies, in order to determine whether a subject (user, application, service, car, ...) is authorized to perform a certain action on a resource.