User management is not novel!

User management is not considered to be a novel act. Even if you are doing it for a very first time, there is a legion who did it before you, and there is no new value you could add. If you are trying to design and implement the solution you are actually reinventing the wheel, which is actually a cost of doing business.

My initial authentication relied on a simple library called passport.js, which was asking Google about Id representing a user.  This was sufficient to keep maps separated. But more advanced scenarios were unlikely to be easy to implement. Questions I was constantly asking myself were f.e.:

• how to solve map sharing and inviting others to discuss the map? Google ID is not sufficient to do that.
• how to inform users about planned outages?
• how to inform users about UI changes to avoid confusion?
  

All those things sound ridiculously simple, but i had a feeling that I was wasting too much time for things that were not the core of my business. So i have decided to play the scenario represented on Figure 1 in order to either deliver user management as a service or use a service provided by others.

Figure 1: Adopting professional user management mechanism.

Yes, the Figure 1 contains the name of a solution that I have adopted. It turned out (to my disappointment, because somebody delivered the solution before me, and surprise at the same time, that it is already done and ready to use) that there are at least two companies delivering User Management As A Service.

• Stormpath - created on March, 2012. $9.7M funding
• Auth0 - created on September, 2014. $2.4M funding.

Stormpath turned out to be much more developer friendly and mature, and had a very reasonable free quota in addition, so here we are - the mapping tool uses Stormpath now.

Mapping is great. Without it, I would not even thought about looking for those providers without being aware of their existence!

Have you tried to look for services that should be already commoditized? What results did you get?