How long does it take to implement Cerbos in production?

Implementation speed is a critical factor when evaluating authorization solutions. Teams need to know whether deployment takes days, weeks, or months before committing resources. Based on production deployments across startups and enterprises, Cerbos implementations typically reach production in days to weeks, with some teams running authorization checks in under 10 minutes from first deployment.

Real implementation timelines from production deployments

Utility Warehouse, an FTSE 250 Index company managing 4,500 services, achieved production deployment within weeks. Rob Crowe, Principal Engineer at Utility Warehouse, reports: "It took us a few days to understand Cerbos and then a couple of weeks to have it up and running in production."

The Utility Warehouse team spent six to eight months analyzing their existing authentication and authorization patterns before implementing Cerbos. However, the actual Cerbos deployment took only weeks once they understood their requirements. The team could review 90% of Cerbos code within a couple of hours, giving them confidence in the solution.

NTWRK implemented Cerbos for their live streaming commerce platform serving 2 million users. Steve High, Staff Engineer at NTWRK, was the sole implementer: "I was the only person working on the implementation and it took me a few months to go from nothing to where we're at right now." High notes the timeline included significant technical debt cleanup that could have been avoided. "Had we not had to do the tech debt clean-up, we probably could have implemented much more quickly. Because Cerbos is plug and play."

Loop, a fintech startup, deployed Cerbos and immediately saw benefits. Mohsin Kalam, CTO and Co-Founder of Loop, emphasizes speed: "It works out of the box. You deploy it and it's running in less than 10 minutes." The rapid deployment enabled Loop to focus engineering resources on core product development rather than authorization infrastructure.

Development time saved compared to building in-house

Loop quantified the savings from not building authorization in-house. Kalam reports saving three to six months of initial development time, with ongoing maintenance savings continuing to accrue. "From the development, to making new changes, and then not having to allocate resources on it - I would say that's roughly six months of development time cost that we've saved, so far."

Salesroom conducted a comprehensive audit before selecting Cerbos. The Head of Engineering at Salesroom calculated "the cost of managing authorization and authentication in-house over the entire lifespan of the company was in the 7 figures." Another startup estimated building similar functionality internally would cost "easily £200,000" in development, excluding ongoing maintenance costs.

Industry research from IDC shows developers spend approximately 19% of their time on security tasks, averaging $28,000 in cost per developer per year. Externalized authorization reclaims this time for core product development, directly impacting time-to-market and revenue generation.

Factors that influence implementation speed

Technical debt cleanup significantly extends implementation timelines. NTWRK's experience demonstrates this challenge. The team spent months untangling existing authorization logic before deploying Cerbos. Organizations with scattered permission checks across codebases need refactoring time before implementing centralized authorization.

Team familiarity with authorization concepts affects learning curves. Multiple enterprise teams report that understanding Cerbos takes "a few days," with production deployment following within weeks. The YAML-based policy format and Google Common Expression Language (CEL) for conditions reduce learning time compared to specialized policy languages.

Organizational complexity influences deployment scope. Simple use cases with straightforward RBAC can deploy faster than complex multi-tenant SaaS platforms requiring ABAC or ReBAC models. However, Cerbos supports starting simple and adding sophistication as requirements evolve, enabling phased implementations.

Integration requirements vary by architecture. Microservices architectures with existing identity providers typically integrate faster than monolithic applications requiring significant refactoring. Utility Warehouse's 95% Go-based services aligned perfectly with Cerbos written in Go, eliminating language compatibility concerns.

Onboarding and team productivity

Developer onboarding happens in hours, not days or weeks. A staff engineer reports: "If you're a decent developer, you can get it running in minutes. I can onboard a new developer onto Cerbos in an hour." This rapid onboarding keeps team velocity high as new members join projects.

Policy creation becomes accessible to non-technical stakeholders. Teams report that product managers and security personnel can understand and validate YAML policies without deep technical knowledge. This accessibility enables faster policy iteration and reduces bottlenecks waiting for engineering resources.

Maintenance overhead drops significantly after implementation. Human Managed switched from complex authorization updates requiring code changes, recompilation, testing, and deployment to five-minute policy updates. This operational efficiency compounds over time as authorization requirements evolve.

Deployment patterns and time to first decision

Sidecar deployments provide the fastest path to production. Teams deploy Cerbos containers alongside application instances, making local API calls for authorization decisions. This pattern eliminates complex networking configuration and enables immediate testing within existing infrastructure.

Service-based PDP deployments require additional infrastructure setup. Teams must configure load balancers, define scaling policies, and establish network connectivity between services and authorization engines. However, even remote deployments typically complete within weeks for organizations with established deployment pipelines.

Hybrid architectures combine both patterns strategically. Critical paths use sidecar deployment for microsecond latency while less time-sensitive operations query a central pool of PDPs. This flexibility lets teams optimize deployment complexity against performance requirements.

Cloud-native deployment through Kubernetes simplifies production rollout. Teams using container orchestration can deploy Cerbos using standard Helm charts or Kubernetes manifests, integrating authorization into existing CI/CD pipelines without specialized tooling.

What is Cerbos?

Cerbos enforces fine-grained access control for applications, APIs, workloads, and AI agents, ensuring every access decision meets your security and compliance requirements. Cerbos is an enterprise-grade authorization software built to secure access across complex, distributed environments, SaaS products, and regulated systems. It externalizes authorization logic from application code, making access control consistent and centrally managed across all your services.

Designed for Zero Trust architectures and AI-driven systems, Cerbos provides continuous, policy-based authorization that scales from local deployments to global production systems. The authorization system supports multiple access control models, including RBAC, ABAC, and PBAC, giving engineering and security teams flexibility to model permissions the way their business needs them.

Cerbos helps you enforce least privilege at scale and maintain full visibility into every access decision with detailed audit logs. The authorization system consists of three connected components working together.

The Policy Decision Point (PDP) is the authorization engine that evaluates access control logic and returns allow or deny decisions to client services. The PDP is open source, stateless, and lightweight, which means it can run anywhere: in containers, Kubernetes clusters, or at the edge. The PDP is optimized for performance and reliability, capable of handling millions of authorization checks per second with predictable latency.

Enforcement Point SDKs are lightweight libraries that enforce authorization decisions directly within your applications and APIs. They provide a simple, language-agnostic interface for calling the PDP in real time and applying its allow or deny responses. The SDKs are easy to integrate and work with any identity provider.

Cerbos Hub is the authorization management software for authoring, testing, deploying, and auditing authorization policies at scale. Organizations use Cerbos Hub to manage policies without redeploying applications. The separation of policy management from application deployment enables rapid iteration on authorization requirements.

For teams evaluating authorization solutions, implementation speed directly impacts time-to-market and development costs. The combination of rapid deployment, minimal learning curve, and low ongoing maintenance makes Cerbos suitable for organizations needing production-ready authorization in days or weeks rather than months.