# Technical Vision for Keystone

This document is a self-evaluation of keystone with regard to the Technical Committee’s technical vision and serves as a basis for guiding the mission of the keystone project. The objectives captured here are what the keystone team strives to build. New features and design changes should be compared with this document before being embarked upon. When such proposals are not in alignment, propose a change to this document or to the overall technical vision to initiate a discussion on the renewed vision for the project.

## Mission Statement

Keystone’s mission is to provide secure, resilient, and user-friendly discovery, authentication, and authorization for multitenant services.

## Vision for OpenStack

### Self-service

Keystone needs to strive to provide a flexible and simple mechanism to expose OpenStack functionality safely and securely in a multi-tenant environment, to enable a true self-service experience for end users in a shared-resource system.

### Application Control

Keystone provides the ability for applications to have their own identity through application credentials, in service of developers building applications that need to access cloud APIs and cloud-native applications.

### Interoperability

Keystone strives for a completely seamless experience for end users and applications running on multiple clouds. Initiatives in service of providing such a consistent user experience include providing a discovery mechanism for available functionality, eliminating optional API extensions, and providing useful default roles which eliminate the need for inconsistently-named, operator-defined roles for similar access levels between clouds. Keystone is also capable of itself acting as a bridge between separate clouds through its Keystone-to-Keystone federated authentication functionality.

### Bidirectional Compatibility

To support clients operating across multiple clouds of potentially different versions, changes in keystone’s major API are additive-only, and updates to the API are signaled by the minor version number, which allows clients to discover, to a reasonable degree, what capabilities are available in the keystone version they are connecting to. Keystone also provides a JSON-home document to aid clients in discovering the availability and status of features. Enhancements to the discoverability of keystone’s APIs are a priority.

### Partitioning

Keystone’s service catalog mechanism makes it possible for users to have authorization for resources in geographically distributed regions, and keystone’s various mechanisms for distributed authentication, such as using a distributed database or LDAP identity backend, using an external authentication source, or federating keystone itself to provide distributed identity providers, support geographically distributed computing. Keystone hopes to create a consistent user story and reference architecture for large-scale distributed deployments, including edge-computing use cases.

### Basic Physical Data Center Management

In support of OpenStack being primarily a data center management tool, keystone should always work out of the box and not rely on the pre-existence of another identity management system in the data center. In practice this means always continuing to support a SQL storage backend for user data.

### Plays Well With Others

Keystone encourages its use outside of an OpenStack environment. In support of this, keystone supports a standard authentication token format (JWT) that can be understood by many applications, and seeks to support full Single-Sign-On functionality that can be used in front of any web application.

### Customizable Integration

In service of supporting customizable integration both between OpenStack services and from client applications, keystone has an ongoing mission to fulfill the Principle of Least Privilege and permit the cloud consumer to delegate only the minimum permissions needed to an application. Keystone works to provide this both through reforming OpenStack policy to make it easier to manage across services, and by providing new mechanisms such as application credential access rules to allow users to restrict capabilities of applications to a subset of service APIs.

### Graphical User Interface

Keystone does not provide a graphical user interface, but must always be mindful of how its APIs will be presented in dashboards. For some features, such as Single-Sign-On authentication, keystone may provide its own graphical user interface in order to provide a smooth web-login experience without requiring a dependency on another dashboard.

### Secure by Design

Keystone strives to be secure by design, by making opinionated choices about the default security configuration. Making it easier to administer fine-grained access control in support of the Principle of Least Privilege is an ongoing effort.

this page last updated: 2026-06-11 21:50:20

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