Integrating Cloudfoundry UAA with external identity provider

Question

We have all the user data in our local mysql database. We are moving our services to cloud and I need to use cloudfoundry UAA to authenticate by calling a login microservice endpoint on our network instead of doing uaac add user for all the users in db.

I am new to this, it would help me if you can explain the steps to do it.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I assume (based on the SAML tags on your question) that you are thinking of doing this with SAML. If this is your first time doing SAML then there is a bit of learning curve. If so you may find it easier to just creating a custom Login app.

SAML

You would setup an Identity Provider and the IdP would authenticate users against either mysql or your login microservice. simplesamlphp can be used for this purpose. A user would authenticate to the IDP, the IdP generates a SAML assertion (e.g a signed xml doc with information about the user) that gets sent to the Service Provider (UAA). The service provider then looks at the assertion to determine who the user is. UAA supports SAML logins. It has been a while since I've set it up that way, but I recall you run a separate 'login' war from the rest of UAA, and the login war uses APIs to talk to UAA. You also need to configure the SAML trust relationship between ssp and the UAA login war. This isn't hard to do if you are familiar with SAML. If you aren't then it can be difficult to get all the pieces right.

Custom Login App I think an easier approach is to just build your own login app that calls your authentication service and the UAA apis. UAA provides a sample app and documentation