📚 Day 3 of Building a Microservices-Based Project
Over the past few days, I've been working on the Authentication Service and learning more about how authentication and session management are handled in backend systems.
Today's focus was on stateless vs stateful authentication, JWTs, Access Tokens, Refresh Tokens, and token persistence.
Some of the things I explored:
🔹 Understanding the difference between stateless and stateful authentication
🔹 Learning how JWT-based authentication enables stateless authorization
🔹 Understanding the difference between Access Tokens and Refresh Tokens
🔹 Generating JWTs and storing them securely in cookies
🔹 Creating a dedicated Refresh Token entity in PostgreSQL using TypeORM
🔹 Persisting refresh tokens in the database instead of relying solely on stateless JWTs
🔹 Learning how JWT IDs can be be used to link tokens with database records
🔹 Updating integration tests to verify refresh token persistence during user registration
One thing I found particularly interesting was the distinction between stateless and stateful authentication.
With stateless authentication, all the information needed to validate a user is contained within the token itself, allowing services to verify requests without querying a database. This can improve scalability and simplify distributed systems.
With stateful authentication, session information is stored on the server side, making it easier to manage active sessions, revoke access, and enforce security policies. By storing refresh tokens in the database, we introduce a stateful component that enables features such as session management, token revocation, and token rotation.
Another valuable lesson was seeing how quickly controllers can become overloaded with responsibilities and how moving logic into dedicated services makes the codebase easier to maintain and test.
Still learning a lot about authentication, security, and microservice architecture, but each step is helping me better understand how production-ready systems are designed.
@codersGyan
#Microservices #BackendDevelopment #NodeJS #TypeScript #JWT #Authentication #PostgreSQL #TypeORM #SoftwareEngineering #LearningInPublic #WebDevelopment