Enable/Disable consumers on demand

[logronoide]

Summary

The platform allows to identify the end users (consumers) of the API thanks to the 'Consumer' entity. There are several use cases for a 'enabled/disabled' flag linked to each Consumer:

• Temporally deny access to upstream resources if the consumer has abused of the service (technically or legally). This allows a middle step before terminating the account of the consumer.
• If the consumer pays for the use of the upstream service, if the consumer stops paying for the service, disabling the account as a first step is a must.
• Fast response of platform admins to bad/poor ACL configuration. Disable consumer account and check what is going on.

Hence, it would be great to implement a new 'enabled' flag for each consumer to control if the consumer is allowed to access the upstream service or not. May be the change sounds simple, but obviously it needs a database model modification to persist the new flag.

[thibaultcha]

This definitely has some value indeed. Before jumping to an implementation, we would need to discuss how disabled account should be handled in the system (especially by authentication plugins), and if they are simply considered as non-existing, vs "disabled" (but still present), which would send different error messages back to the user - unless that is not desired, all points to be discussed.

[Tieske]

Wouldn't this be solved by #2023 ? Attach a plugin to a consumer that returns any specified status code and response. 503 service unavailable for example.

If you want the consumer to become non-existent as mentioned by @thibaultcha you can delete it.

[Tieske]

considering that the difference between "unavailable" and "disabled" does not apply to consumers, then #2328 does implement this request.

hence closing this.

[jack9ye]

I've tried #2328 but got http 400 "No consumer can be configured for that plugin". And i saw a line of "no_consumer = true" in schema.lua of this plugin. I'm new to Kong so is there anything i missed?

[Tieske]

No, you are correct, that setting seems to be bad.