From Weeks to Minutes: How DataRobot Accelerated Service Integration and Fortified Security with Ory

About DataRobot

DataRobot delivers artificial intelligence (AI) that maximizes impact and minimizes business risk. Their platform and applications integrate into core business processes, so teams can develop, deliver, and govern AI at scale. DataRobot empowers practitioners to deliver predictive and generative AI, and enables leaders to secure their AI assets.

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Challenges

DataRobot began moving to Kubernetes over the last couple years. That move required Marc Manza, Sr. Director Engineering, and team have a secure service-to-service communication model. A critical part of that service communication was authentication and authorization. Mark and team’s homegrown solution had become too complex and time consuming as the number of services and accounts grew. The homegrown system didn’t adhere to strict security principles, a gap the team wanted to fill.

The DataRobot team’s primary goal was to simplify the process of registering a trusted service. They sought a common framework for managing security and introducing service principles that were easy and straightforward to use by their engineering teams.

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Solution

A challenge in finding a viable solution was that DataRobot needed a platform to run in multiple deployment environments, multi-tenant SaaS on AWS and self-managed on-prem deployments by customers. DataRobot needed a solution to span across all diverse environments, and this proved to be an issue for traditional IAM vendors.

One of the major factors in choosing Ory is that it’s not opinionated. It's flexible in how you set up users, how you set up authentication & authorization and doesn’t force a particular way, or opinion. We felt like we could grow with a solution as flexible and customizable as Ory.

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

We were able to introduce Ory into our ecosystem without disrupting our ecosystem. It’s very flexible.

Matthew Finn - Engineering Manager

DataRobot started with Ory Hydra open-source so everyone could get familiar with the technology. Once Ory was deployed in multiple places, they needed enterprise support versus just community support.

We needed Ory enterprise level support and wanted expert help, faster access to new features and enhancements, and resolutions and SLAs to common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

With Ory, implementation is just faster. Because we don’t have to implement the whole solution, we can pick and choose specific components and go from there. Ory truly is super flexible in how you deploy, how you run, and gives us the customizability to easily change in the future.

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

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Results

We accomplished our goal of engineers being able to bring up a new service and integrate into our ecosystem literally in minutes! Before Ory it would have taken upwards of a couple weeks.

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

Another benefit of Ory Hydra is that DataRobot can use it in other applications. It gives us a headstart versus completely building from scratch. Today we use it for service-to-service communications, but we’ve contemplated using it for our front-door authentication and a passkeys layer. We think we could literally insert Ory and it would just work!

Matthew Finn - Engineering Manager

With the old homegrown solution, it was a monumental effort just to maintain systems. Now with Ory, improvements and updates are just absorbed by all teams and DataRobot has virtually eliminated engineering time for system maintenance.

Ory was huge in helping us improve security across the board. Ory allowed us to add our own ‘secret sauce’ to the security formula and did everything we asked it to do, even during high traffic demands!

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

Ory has been responsive to any issues the team has had. DataRobot has confidence that whatever issue may arise in the future, the Ory support team is very capable and responsive. Additionally, Marc explained that Ory is relatively low in needing resources, making it cost efficient to run.

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The Future

I would highly recommend Ory. I championed Ory into DataRobot. Ory is flexible and therefore appealing to those still figuring out their specific needs and how they want to bring that to life versus being forced into a vendor’s approach.

Marc Manza - Sr. Director Engineering

The DataRobot team is looking at growing into FedRAMP compliance. They are evaluating Ory Kratos in order to become a dedicated IdP. DataRobot is also reviewing Ory Keto for permission management. The future is bright with Ory and the support is stellar.

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