Hi Lars,

Good question.  My organization is also asking similar questions about adopting Keycloak.  Let me give my understanding as a user, then Keycloak team can correct my misunderstandings.

Basically, Keycloak offers coarse-grained authorizations (realm-roles and client-app roles) assigned to users (or groups).   So I understand Keycloak will let you grant user Bob the 'myapp-admin' role.  However, it falls to the backend service or application to then map that role to application-specific permissions.  For example, role 'myapp-admins' can access /myapp/project1/admin page.  This resource security can be done (for Java apps) in declarative fashion using web.xml security constraints.  Alternatively, your application code could dynamically obtain the Keycloak user principal, check their roles, and map into your app's permission scheme.  

This understanding implies that your application is responsible for an admin UI to map fine-grained permissions on your app's resources to Keycloak roles.   If your app only has 'coarse-grained" resources, then you can probably just use Keycloak roles, with no need for a permission layer or the UI it entails.

Also, see this pre-amble about Permission Scopes. In future, it sounds like Keycloak team is considering support for the UMA portion of the OAuth standard.  This may help with fine-grained permission management within Keycloak itself?

Hope this helps,
Guy

<sorry, original response was only to Lars, now to list as well>

On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 8:29 PM, Lars Noldan <lars.noldan@drillinginfo.com> wrote:
We're in the investigation stage on moving from a $BigExpensiveVendor solution toward keycloak, and we're looking for a solution to help manage both Course and Fine grained entitlements.  Keycloak appears to be a fantastic authentication solution, but I'm wondering what are you, the keycloak community using to handle Authorization?

Thanks!

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