Owning your sign-in feels good: your data, your rules, no one else’s roadmap. It also means the thing that lets everyone into everything is now yours to look after. This is a checklist for deciding if that trade suits you.
The case for doing it
- Your users’ identities stay on your infrastructure
- You choose the sign-in experience, down to the colours
- You can leave any time, because nothing is hidden inside someone else’s platform
What you are signing up for
Backups you have actually restored. A backup you have never restored is a hope. Practise once, calmly, before you need it.
A plan for lost devices. People will lose their phones. Decide how recovery works and who can approve it.
Keys that rotate. Signing keys should change on a schedule, and the change should be boring. Know how it happens before the first time.
Someone who gets the alert. Sign-in down means everything is down. Decide who hears about it, and what they do first.
Upgrades you can reverse. Test them somewhere safe, keep the previous version at hand, and read the release notes before you run anything.
A quick self-check
If you can answer “yes” to these, you are in good shape:
- Do you know where the database lives and who can reach it?
- Have you restored from a backup in the last three months?
- Can you explain what happens when someone loses every device?
- Does someone own the pager when sign-in breaks?
One last thing
None of this needs to be done perfectly on day one. Start with the backup you have restored, and add the rest one calm step at a time. If you have a story from your own setup, I would love to hear it.