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Copilot AI commented Jan 15, 2026

What this PR does / why we need it:

Adds comprehensive blog post announcing Feast's RBAC capabilities. Post covers:

  • Permission model fundamentals: Resources, actions, and role-based policies
  • Security architecture: Kubernetes RBAC and OIDC integration for distributed deployments
  • Configuration examples: Python code snippets demonstrating Permission objects with name patterns, tags, and role assignments
  • Operational guidance: CLI commands for inspecting and troubleshooting permissions

Example permission configuration from the post:

from feast.permissions.action import AuthzedAction, READ

# Grant lab team access to their feature views
Permission(
   name="lab-reader",
   types=[FeatureView],
   name_patterns="lab.*",  # Regex pattern matching
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["lab"]),
   actions=[AuthzedAction.DESCRIBE, READ],
)

# Restrict high-risk data source writes to admin roles
Permission(
   name="data-writer",
   types=[DataSource],
   required_tags={"risk_level": "high"},
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["admin", "data_team"]),
   actions=[WRITE],
)

Post includes architecture diagram showing the four-layer distributed model (management, data, service, security/client layers) and clarifies that RBAC enforcement only applies when using remote Feast services.

Which issue(s) this PR fixes:

Addresses documentation request for RBAC feature announcement.

Misc

Authors: Danielle Martinoli and Francisco Javier Arceo

Original prompt

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>Add blog post on RBAC</issue_title>
<issue_description>Please make a blog post to the website about our RBAC capabilities.

Feast Launches RBAC! 🚀

What is the Feast Permission Model?

Feast now supports Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) so you can secure and govern your data.

If you ever wanted to securely partition your feature store across different teams, the new Feast permissions model is here to make that possible!

This powerful feature allows administrators to configure granular authorization policies, letting them decide which users and groups can access specific resources and what operations they can perform.

The default implementation is based on Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): user roles determine whether a user has permission to perform specific functions on registered resources.

Why is RBAC important for Feast?

Feature stores often operate on sensitive, proprietary data and we want to make sure teams are able to govern the access and control of that data thoughtfully, while benefiting from transparent code and an open source community like Feast.

That’s why we built RBAC using Kubernetes RBAC and OpenID Connect protocol (OIDC), ensuring secure, fine-grained access control in Feast.

What are the Benefits of using Feast Permissions?

Using the Feast Permissions Model offers two key benefits:

  1. Securely share and partition your feature store: grant each team only the minimum privileges necessary to access and manage the relevant resources.
  2. Adopt a Service-Oriented Architecture and leverage the benefits of a distributed system.

How Feast Uses RBAC

Permissions as Feast resources

The RBAC configuration is defined using a new Feast object type called “Permission”. Permissions are registered in the Feast registry and are defined and applied like all the other registry objects, using Python code.

A permission is defined by these three components:

  • A resource: a Feast object that we want to secure against unauthorized access. It's identified by the matching type(s), a possibly empty list of name patterns and a dictionary of required tags.
  • An action: a logical operation performed on the secured resource, such as managing the resource state with CREATE, DESCRIBE, UPDATE or DELETE, or accessing the resource data with READ and WRITE (differentiated by ONLINE and OFFLINE store types)
  • A policy: the rule to enforce authorization decisions based on the current user. The default implementation uses role-based policies.

The resource types supported by the permission framework are those defining the customer feature store:

  • Project
  • Entity
  • FeatureView
  • OnDemandFeatureView
  • BatchFeatureView
  • StreamFeatureView
  • FeatureService
  • DataSource
  • ValidationReference
  • SavedDataset
  • Permission

TIP: Check out the Permission APIs in the Feast Python API Documentation to learn more!

# This configuration grants users with the 'owner' role permissions 
# to fetch resource status and read data from all the feature views 
from feast.permissions.action import AuthzedAction, READ
# Note: READ is a global list including both READ_OFFLINE and
# READ_ONLINE values from AuthzedAction enum

# You do not have to specify `name_patterns`
Permission(
   name="fv-owner",
   types=[FeatureView],
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["owner"]),
   actions=[AuthzedAction.DESCRIBE, READ],
)

# This configuration grants users with the 'lab' role permissions 
# to fetch resource status and read data from all feature views 
# named 'lab_stream_feature_view' or 'lab_feature_view'
from feast.permissions.action import AuthzedAction, READ

Permission(
   name="lab-reader",
   types=[FeatureView],
   name_patterns=["lab_stream_feature_view", "lab_feature_view"],
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["lab"]),
   actions=[AuthzedAction.DESCRIBE, READ],
)

# As an alternative, we can use Python regular expression patterns
# to grant the same permission to all feature views whose name
# starts by 'lab'
from feast.permissions.action import AuthzedAction, READ

Permission(
   name="lab-reader",
   types=[FeatureView],
   name_patterns="lab.*", # Accepts both 'str' and 'list[str]' types
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["lab"]),
   actions=[AuthzedAction.DESCRIBE, READ],
)

# This configuration grants users with the 'prod' role permissions 
# to fetch resource status and read data from all feature views 
# whose names include the '_prod_' word
from feast.permissions.action import AuthzedAction, READ

Permission(
   name="prod-reader",
   types=[FeatureView, FeatureService],
   name_patterns=".*_prod_.*",
   policy=RoleBasedPolicy(roles=["prod"]),
   actions=[AuthzedAction.DESCRIBE, READ],
)

# This ...

</details>



<!-- START COPILOT CODING AGENT SUFFIX -->

- Fixes feast-dev/feast#5860

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Co-authored-by: franciscojavierarceo <4163062+franciscojavierarceo@users.noreply.github.com>
Copilot AI changed the title [WIP] Add blog post on RBAC capabilities feat: Add RBAC blog post to website Jan 15, 2026
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