Choosing between self-hosted and managed Keycloak affects more than where your identity service runs. It determines who maintains the infrastructure, who handles security updates, and how much responsibility your team takes on when users need to authenticate.

When you add authentication to an application, it's easy to focus on the login screen. You choose between passwords and passkeys, connect an identity provider, and make sure users can access their accounts. But there's another question worth asking before your application goes live: where are your users' credentials stored, and who is responsible for protecting them?

Keycloak gives developers control over authentication and identity management. You can run it on infrastructure you manage, or use a managed Keycloak service that takes care of much of the underlying operation.

Both approaches can work well.…