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Lesson plan 40: Security and isolation
Trace authentication, authorization, and isolation through a data request and subscription.
Placement: Part 7: Building and operating applications on these engines.
Prerequisites: Lesson 39: Failure recovery and continuity, plus the earlier dependency chain.
Learning outcomes
- Trace authentication, authorization, and isolation through a data request and subscription.
- Explain row/column visibility, resource abuse, key handling, and audit obligations.
- Identify why shared caches, internal services, and authorization changes need explicit trust boundaries.
- Separate a general mechanism, a documented implementation choice, and an illustrative numerical assumption.
Teaching sequence
- Establish the motivating situation: A valid authenticated account changes a tenant identifier and reads another tenant’s rows.
- Introduce the vocabulary and the correctness obligation before an optimization. Define authentication, authorization, visibility.
- Develop the mechanism: Follow identity through every trust boundary; analyze queries, caches, subscriptions, logs, and restore access.
- Follow the complete worked example: An unbounded 10 MB response requested 1000 times/s creates 10 GB/s of payload demand. Explain the assumptions, intermediate units, and limiting interpretation.
- Extend the scenario to changed load, skew, or failure, explaining encryption, keys, audits, abuse, tenant separation.
- Connect the mechanism to a documented implementation and an alternative with a different workload fit. Close by stating the remaining cost and the next lesson dependency.
Required chapter material
Use a complete execution trace or worked calculation, supported by an annotated static diagram or table. Include language-neutral pseudocode or labeled SQL when it clarifies the mechanism. State preconditions, ownership, visibility, and failure boundaries for algorithms. Describe operational costs as well as the normal path. All questions raised in the narrative must be resolved in the text.
Visual explanation
A request-path trust diagram labels identity verification, policy evaluation, data access, derived caches, and outgoing delivery. The accompanying prose explains the arrows, state changes, or table entries so the lesson remains understandable in a plain Markdown reader.
Editorial checks
Confirm that the numerical example agrees with its units and assumptions. Check that a faster path preserves the stated contract, or explicitly identify the changed guarantee. Keep hypothetical figures separate from product measurements. Explain both an appropriate use and a limitation of the case design. Check terminology against the glossary and links against the course index.