orglet

Orglet is a term used in software development to describe a small, focused component responsible for managing organizational data within an application. It is not a standardized specification; usage varies by project. In many cases, an orglet acts as a lightweight directory or directory-like service that stores and exposes information about organizations, departments, teams, roles, and user memberships, and supports queries over the organization’s structure.

Typical responsibilities include providing API access (REST or GraphQL) to fetch organizational hierarchies and membership, enforcing basic access control mappings, and emitting events when changes occur. The data model often includes entities such as Organization, Department, Team, Role, and User, with relationships that express containment and inheritance of permissions. An orglet may also synchronize with external identity providers or enterprise directories.

Architecturally, orglet can be a stateless microservice or a stateful component. It commonly uses a relational or graph database, offers multi-tenancy support, and integrates with authentication systems, logging, monitoring, and auditing. Deployment is usually container-based, orchestrated by platforms like Kubernetes, and can be exposed via standard APIs, with considerations for data consistency, schema versioning, and security.

Because "orglet" is not a widely standardized term, it may be used differently across projects. In practice, similar functionality may be implemented as an organization service, directory service, or part of an IAM system, often bridging between HR/identity sources and application access policies.