The new Organizations feature enables a the Coder deployment to handle multiple organization records. The development effort to support this feature started in Coder versions as early as v2.9. You can look at the development milestone for the Organizations feature if you are interested in how this feature was brought into the codebase over time.
We released the Organizations feature as a Premium-licensed beta feature in Coder v2.16.0; and we consider the feature stable as of Coder v2.16.1.
What is the relationship between “Organization” and “Group”?
A Coder Organization can contain one or more Groups. Prior to multi-organization support, Groups were the only level of user and permission aggregation. Now, you can create a permission hierarchy of Groups and Users per Organization.
Similarities:
- Both Organizations and Groups are used for grouping users together based on shared characteristics or attributes.
- Both can be used to manage permissions and access controls within an organization.
Differences:
- Scope: Organizations are higher-level entities that encompass multiple groups, workspaces, and users. Groups, on the other hand, are smaller collections of users that share common attributes.
- Hierarchy: Organizations have a hierarchical structure, with organizations containing groups, which in turn contain users. Groups do not have a direct hierarchy with organizations.
- Permissions: While both can be used for permission management, Organizations provide a more granular level of control over permissions and access levels. Groups are better suited for grouping users based on shared attributes or roles, without affecting the underlying organization structure.
- Customization: Organizations allow you to create custom roles and permissions for each organization, while groups do not have this level of customization.