JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are a neat tool useful in many contexts from simple demos to complicated multi-server architectures. The goal of the talk is to give developers a basic understanding of what JWTs are, why they are useful, and how to get started using them in python. JWTs can be as lightweight as a JWT library and a few decorators or as thorough as a full-fledged authentication architecture.
When using public key encryption/signatures, validating the JWT does not need require maintaining state, secrets, passwords, or user databases. This makes JWTs a robust, efficient, and flexible tool for serverless applications, horizontal scaling (e.g., load balancing), microservices, and APIs.
In this talk, I will provide an introduction to JWTs and provide a simple example of how they can be combined with decorators for easy and flexible authentication. The goal is to give developers unfamiliar with JWTs ideas on how and when to include them in their own applications.