Building reliable (and fast) directory sync
The article explains that directory sync is the process of copying user and group data from an identity provider to an application to manage access control. It distinguishes this mechanism from Single Sign-On and illustrates how flattening nested group memberships simplifies database queries for access verification. The author notes that while SCIM is the leading standard for this task, their organization chose to build a custom engine from scratch instead.
- ▪Directory sync involves copying users, groups, and memberships from an identity provider to keep an application's local copy up to date.
- ▪Flattening nested group memberships into direct user-to-group rows allows for faster access checks compared to recursive queries.
- ▪The article clarifies that directory sync is distinct from Single Sign-On, which handles authentication rather than user provisioning.
- ▪The author states that their team opted to forgo the SCIM standard to build their own directory sync engine from scratch.
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Record
| Original publisher | Firezone |
| Canonical URL | https://www.firezone.dev/blog/building-reliable-directory-sync |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 04:45:36 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T06:25:44.501Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T06:25:44.501Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jLooXFf4O-sJ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Jamil Bou KheirOctober 1, 2026Building reliable (and fast!) directory sync“Who’s your User?”— Master Control Program, TRON (1982) If user identity is important to your application, you need a way to manage it. Usually this means user accounts, and you create them when someone signs up. But allowing employees to sign up for whatever SaaS app strikes their fancy is a management nightmare. So organizations like ways to control which users exist (or do not exist) in your app. That controls who can sign in, but how about what they can do? For that you need roles, or groups, which, like the users, come from the organization's identity provider - Entra, Google, Okta, etc. Groups form the basis of Firezone's access model. They determine who can access what.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Firezone.
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