User Management and Access Controls

Tecton access controls enable organizations to configure fine-grained governance over who and what can modify the Feature Platform and access feature data.

Access controls are configured by granting roles to principals. Most roles apply to actions that a principal can perform in a specific workspace.

info

Tecton Access Controls govern access to Tecton metadata and online features, but not access to offline data. See limitations.

Tecton Principals

In Tecton, access controls are used to specify what actions a principal is able to perform. A principal is a User, Service Account, or Principal Group.

Users

The User principal represents an individual who accesses an organization's Tecton Account by logging in with their own credentials to the Tecton UI or CLI. Users need to be configured with the appropriate Tecton access controls in order to develop with Tecton, or administer the account.

Service Accounts

The Service Account principal represents machine access to the Tecton Account, such as a training pipeline or an ML application accessing features. Service Accounts authenticate access using API keys.

Principal Groups

Tecton Principal Groups simplify the process of granting your Tecton users access to the appropriate resources. By organizing Tecton Users and Services Accounts into Groups, Administrators can simply make role changes at the Group level to govern their organization.

When a User or Service Account is added to a Principal Group, then they will inherit any roles that have been granted to said Principal Group. Principals that are members of multiple groups will inherit the union of roles across those groups.

Additionally, Administrators can automate Group membership configuration by using Identity Provider Attributes. Identity Provider Attributes automatically assign Users to Groups at sign-in time, based on attributes passed in from your Identity Provider during the Single Sign-On process.

Summary of roles and permissions

Workspace-level roles

The following roles can be granted in a workspace.

• Owner: Can perform any action in an existing workspace. The Owner role is automatically granted to the creator of a workspace.
• Editor: Can modify the workspace itself, but not other users' access. Also includes Operator's and Consumer's permissions.
• Consumer: Can access online data. Also includes Viewer's permissions.
• Operator: Can manage materialization jobs. Also includes Viewer's permissions.
• Viewer: Can view definitions and metadata.

Instance-level roles

The Admin role

Principals with the admin account type have the Admin role. The Admin role can add/remove users, grant/revoke workspace-level roles to principals and create live workspaces.

The Principal role

Principals with the default account type have the Principal role. This role grants basic permissions, such as the permission to create development workspaces and Service Accounts.

All-Workspace roles

Any of the workspace-level roles can optionally be granted across all workspaces, to a user or a Service Account. Doing so allows the user or Service Account to perform the actions allowed by that role, across all workspaces. The principal will automatically assume that role on all new workspaces created thereafter.

Only admins can assign an all-workspace role to a user or Service Account.

Configure Access Controls

Access controls can be configured on the Permissions screen and Accounts & Access screen in your Tecton cluster’s Web UI, located at https://<your Tecton instance prefix>.tecton.ai.

The Permissions screen contains a subset of the access control settings that are available on the Accounts & Access screen. See the next two sections for details.

The Permissions screen

The Permissions screen allows you to configure access controls for a specific workspace. To access this screen, select Permissions under the Workspaces section on the left side of the Web UI. After selecting Permissions, you will see a list of all users that have access to the workspace and the workspace roles each user has been granted. Selecting the Service Accounts tab will show you the same information for Service Accounts.

On the Permissions screen, you can perform the following tasks by following the steps specified in the second column.

Task	How to perform the task
Add a user to the workspace	Under the User's tab, click Add User to workspace.
Remove a user from the workspace	For the user who you want to remove, click the Edit icon on the right, then select None and click Change access.
Modify a user’s workspace roles	For the user for whose workspace roles want to modify, click the Edit icon on the right, then select the appropriate role and click Change access.
Add a Service Account to the workspace	Select the Service Accounts tab, then click Add Service Account to workspace.
Remove a Service Account from the workspace	For the Service Account you want to remove, click the Edit icon on the right, then select None and click Change access.
Modify a Service Accounts’s workspace roles	For the Service Account for whose workspace roles want to modify, click the Edit icon on the right, then select the appropriate role and click Change access.

The Accounts & Access screen

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This screen is accessible only to users with the Admin role.

The Accounts & Access screen allows you to configure access controls for any workspace. Additionally, you can configure user access to your Tecton instance and create Service Accounts.

To access this screen, select Accounts & Access under the Workspaces section on the left side of the Web UI. After selecting Accounts & Access, you will see a list of all users who have access to your Tecton cluster. Selecting the Service Accounts tab will show you the same information for Service Accounts.

On this screen, you can perform the following tasks by following the steps specified in the second column.

User management

Task	How to perform the task
Add a user to the Tecton cluster.	Click Invite User.
Remove a user from the Tecton instance.	In the Actions column, click the Delete icon.
Unlock a user.	On the Users tab, click on the user’s name. On the left side, in the Admin Actions section, click Unlock User.

Service Account management

Task	How to perform the task
Create a Service Account.	Select the Service Accounts tab, and click Create new Service Account.
Deactivate and delete a Service Account	In the Actions column, click Deactivate. Once deactivated, click Delete in the Actions column.

Principal Group management

Task	How to perform the task
Create a Principal Group	On the Groups tab, click Create Group. Enter a unique name and optionally a description.
Add Users or Service Accounts to a Principal Group	On the Groups tab, click on the group's name. On the right side, in the Users or Service Accounts tab, click Add User or Service Account to Group and select the members.
Remove Users or Service Accounts from a Principal Group	On the Groups tab, click on the group's name. On the right side, in the Users or Service Accounts tab, click the delete icon next to the principals to delete.
Modify IdP attributes for a Principal Group	On the Groups tab, click on the group's name. On the left side, in the Identity Provider Attributes section, click Add Attribute, or click the update or delete icons next to an existing attribute.

Assigning and un-assigning access

Task	How to perform the task
Show all workspaces a principal has access to, along with the roles they have been granted in each workspace.	On the Users, Service Accounts, or Groups tab, click on the principal’s name. This information is shown on the right side.
Add a principal to a workspace.	On the Users, Service Accounts, or Groups tab, click on the principal’s name. At the top, click Assign Workspace Access.
Modify a principal’s workspace roles.	On the Users, Service Accounts, or Groups tab, click on the principal’s name. On the right side, click the Edit icon on the right, then select None and click Change access.
Modify a principal’s account type.	On the Users, Service Accounts, or Groups tab, click on the principal’s name. On the left side, click the Edit icon next to Account Type, and select the desired account type.

Managing Service Accounts and role assignments with the CLI

The Tecton CLI additionally provides commands for creating and managing Service Accounts, and assigning or unassigning roles.

Service Account Management

To create, modify, and delete Service Accounts, use the tecton service-account command. Run tecton service-account --help for details on how to use the command.

Assigning and un-assigning access

To list, assign, or unassign a role from a principal, use the tecton access-control command. Run tecton access-control --help for details on how to use the command.

Authentication introspection

For convenience, you can also run the tecton whoami CLI command to inspect what principal is being used to authenticate the CLI.

User management using an identity provider

If you use an identity provider with Tecton (i.e. have SSO configured), just-in-time (JIT) provisioning occurs; the first time a user signs in to Tecton, a user account is created and the account appears on the Accounts & Access screen. If the user already had a Tecton account with the same email, signin via SSO logs the user in as the existing user. Each time the user signs in via their identity provider, the user's first and last name are also updated.

If a user is removed from your identity provider, the user account will still exist in Tecton, although that user will not be able to sign in, as they will be denied access by your identity provider. To completely remove the user from Tecton, delete the user from the Accounts & Access screen.

To set up SSO, reach out to your account representative or support.

Group management using an identity provider

Public Preview

This feature is currently in Public Preview.

Group memberships in Tecton can be managed by your Identity Provider. Tecton updates group memberships by matching group information provided by your Identity Provider during SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) with values configured on each group.

To have your Identity Provider manage group memberships:

1. Ensure your users sign in to Tecton via single sign-on (SSO) with SAML.
2. Configure your Identity Provider to include a groups attribute in the SAML assertion with attribute values that will be used to map to Tecton groups. Typically, this means passing through a subset of the groups defined in your Identity Provider (If using Okta, see Okta's Define group attribute statements docs for details).
3. Configure each group in Tecton (on the group's details page in the Accounts & Access screen) with the groups attribute values that map to the group. Matching any value is sufficient to map a user to the group.

Each time a user signs in via SSO with SAML, the user's group memberships update based upon whether the user's SAML's groups attribute values match any of a group's identity provider groups mapping values.

• If a new match is made, the user is added to the group. For new matches or if the user was previously manually added to the group, the group membership becomes managed by identity provider groups mappings.
• If a previous match no longer exists, the user is removed from the group.
• Manually created group memberships are preserved.

Identity provider groups mapping example

Consider a company with several teams that use Tecton and each of these has a group in their Identity Provider:

• Platform
• Fraud

If they want everyone to have the Viewer role, the Platform team to have Operator and the Fraud team to have Consumer, then they could define these principal groups:

Group Name	Role	Identity Provider Groups Mapping
Everyone	Viewer (on all workspaces)	Plaform & Fraud
Operations	Operator (on all workspaces)	Plaform
ML Engineers	Consumer (on prod workspace)	Fraud

Now imagine some users sign-in via SSO with SAML with different group information from their Identity Provider, they would be added to the following Tecton groups:

Person	Identity Provider groups values	Tecton group memberships
Alice	Platform	Everyone & Operations
Sienna	Fraud	Everyone & ML Engineers
Isabel	Platform & Fraud	Everyone, Operations & ML Engineers

Now imagine Alice moves from the Platform team to the Fraud team. On their next sign-in to Tecton, their group memberships would change: they would be removed from Operations and added to ML Engineers. Group memberships would then be:

Person	Identity Provider groups values	Tecton group memberships
Alice	Fraud	Everyone & ML Engineers
Sienna	Fraud	Everyone & ML Engineers
Isabel	Platform & Fraud	Everyone, Operations & ML Engineers

Below is a snippet showing how the group information should be passed in the SAML for a user with both the Platform & Fraud identity provider group attribute values. Note that each value must have its own AttributeValue tag.

<saml2:Attribute Name="groups" NameFormat="urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:attrname-format:unspecified">
    <saml2:AttributeValue>Platform</saml2:AttributeValue>
    <saml2:AttributeValue>Fraud</saml2:AttributeValue>
</saml2:Attribute>

Best practices for configuring access controls

Use Principal Groups for managing access

Create principal groups with different access levels. For example, create an admin group for your Tecton administrators, and then grant it the admin role. Or create a group for a team of users with access granted on a set of workspaces. Grant the group a role on a new workspace, and all users in the group will inherit this role on the new workspace.

The moment a member is removed from the group, they immediately lose access to the roles and permissions they inherited from the group membership. They may still have access to the workspace via a role directly assigned to them.

Leverage your Identity Provider's data for group management

Take advantage of the groups that exist in your identity provider and map them to groups in Tecton (See: Group management using an identity provider). With Identity Provider groups mappings, group memberships can be setup for new users OOTB so they have the access then need on first-login to Tecton. By leveraging your Identity Provider for group membership changes in Tecton, your existing internal controls for access grants can be followed.

Use caution when granting Owner or Editor role to live workspaces

A principal with Owner or Editor roles can take actions in a workspace that can impact a production system. For example, running tecton apply on a workspace causes the workspace objects that were modified or removed to be deleted and replaced with the objects that are being applied.

Typically the Editor role will only be granted to the Service Account used for CI/CD, as well as a limited number of team members in case there is a need to apply directly.

Users and service accounts who do not need to tecton apply should be granted either the Viewer role, to view the workspace and metadata, or the Operator role, to also manage materialization jobs.

Use development workspaces for feature development

Feature development should be done in development workspaces. The developer should verify the transformation logic works as intended before promoting the feature to a production workspace.

Setting SDK credentials in a notebook

When developing features in a notebook, there are several different ways to authenticate to a Tecton instance:

• For Databricks notebooks
• For EMR notebooks
• For Jupyter notebooks with Snowflake
• For Vertex notebooks It is recommended to use either session-scoped user credentials or session-scoped Service Account credentials, rather than environment-scoped Service Account credentials.

Limitations

Offline materialized feature access depends on AWS or Snowflake roles

Accessing offline materialized feature data with the Tecton SDK depends on both Tecton and underlying storage permissions. Accessing feature data without the Tecton SDK can be done with only permissions to the underlying feature storage.

The principal must have at least the Viewer role on the relevant workspace to run commands that access offline materialized data, such as FeatureService.get_historical_features(). To restrict a user's offline materialized data access to specific workspaces, see configuring offline store access per workspace.

For Tecton on Databricks or EMR, access to offline feature data depends on the instance profile for the notebook cluster having access to the Tecton S3 bucket created during deployment.

For Tecton on Snowflake, access to offline feature data depends on the user’s access to the Tecton database created during deployment.

Workspace objects, such as data sources and feature views, cannot be shared between workspaces

If you set up separate workspaces for different teams, they will not be able to share objects in these workspaces. You can however use the same object definitions in multiple workspaces.

Complete list of permissions for each role

Workspace permissions

These roles are configured per workspace, or across all workspaces.

Permission	Owner role	Editor role	Consumer role	Operator role	Viewer role
View workspace objects (such as data sources and feature views) and health status of the workspace	x	x	x	x	x
Interact with workspace objects in SDK	x	x	x	x	x
Request online features*	x	x	x
Delete workspace	x
Run tecton plan	x	x	x	x	x
Run tecton apply	x	x
Run tecton apply --suppress-recreates	x
Run tecton restore	x	x	x	x	x
Create and delete datasets	x	x
FeatureTable.ingest()	x	x
FeatureView.delete_keys()	x	x
Cancel/retry/overwrite materialization jobs	x	x		x
Manually trigger materialization jobs	x	x		x

* Role changes may take up to a minute to propagate to the GetFeatures API.

Platform management permissions

Permission	Admin role	Principal role
Create live workspace	x
Create dev workspace	x	x
Invite users (create, delete, resend)	x
View all users	x	x
Remove user from account	x
Create a Service Account	x	x
Modify Service Account metadata	x	x*
Deactivate or Delete a Service Account	x	x*
Create or update a Principal Group	x
Delete a Principal Group	x
Edit IdP attributes for a Principal Group	x
View IdP attributes for a Principal Group	x
Add members to a Principal Group	x
Modify Data Platform configuration	x

* Only if the principal created the Service Account.

Access control permissions

Permission	Admin role	Principal role	Owner role	Editor role	Consumer role	Operator role	Viewer role
View your assignments for user-facing roles	x	x
View account types	x
Modify account types	x
Assign/unassign All Workspaces role	x
View assignments of workspace-level roles	x		x*	x*	x*	x*	x*
Assign/unassign workspace-level roles	x		x*

* The role applies to a specific workspace, or across all workspaces.