Before we talk about design patterns for Open Policy Agent (OPA) (what they are, why they’re beneficial, what their key ideas are, and how you might try to see them in action with sample data/apps in Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) Free), it’s helpful to start with some background. When we designed the OPA at Styra, we aimed to make it flexible enough to solve every authorization and policy problem in the cloud-native space (and beyond).
It’s been a whirlwind year for Styra — from going fully remote as a company to raising $40 million in Series B Funding to more than doubling our workforce. We have a lot to be thankful for as a company, and before we say “goodbye” to 2021 and “hello'' to 2022, I wanted to take a moment to recap some of my favorite moments and initiatives of this past year.
Open Policy Agent (OPA) allows developers to accelerate time to market and focus on their differentiated work, instead of spending their time figuring out how they are going to write bespoke authorization policies. With OPA handling authorization decisions across the stack, each service, app or platform API just has to handle enforcement of OPA decisions.
It’s that time of year again — full of ugly sweaters, holiday cookies and technology predictions (cloud-native style)! Last year, we predicted that we’d see continued Kubernetes adoption, focus on DevSecOps in organizations and open source dominance. This year, we sat down with our co-founder and CTO, Tim Hinrichs and our CEO Bill Mann to hear a few of their predictions for the open source and cloud-native authorization market.
Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), both SaaS and self-hosted, as well as Open Policy Agent (OPA), are not affected by the Log4j security vulnerability. The newest Apache Log4j Java-based logging utility vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed to Apache by Alibaba's Cloud Security Team on November, 24 2021 by Chen Zhaojun and published on December, 9 2021.
Enterprises have traditionally relied on perimeter network security to keep attackers out and protect their organizationally unique sensitive data and resources. This approach works on the principle “verify, always trust” wherein authenticated users inside the network are trusted by default and allowed unfettered access. With the shift to cloud-native architecture, perimeter-based defenses have become obsolete and leave systems inherently vulnerable to malicious actors.
We just open sourced our Kubernetes controller for the Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). If you are interested in managing OPAs via Styra DAS via Kubernetes, read on.
In the early days of Styra when we were creating Open Policy Agent (OPA), we had a singular goal in mind: help engineers enforce any policy over any piece of software. We wanted people to be able to write any policy they’d like, whether it be about complex resources managed by Kubernetes or public cloud, APIs routed through gateways or service meshes, data stored in relational or document databases, application deployments controlled by CICD pipelines, and so on.
As we embark on another holiday season in the United States, we are being told to start our holiday shopping even earlier this year to avoid some of the delays in shipping. These slowdowns stem from a number of factors, including container shortages, Covid-19 outbreaks that backlogged ports, and a dearth of truck drivers and warehouse workers. Even without the shortages and slowdowns, retailers are in for a long holiday season ahead of them as sales are predicted to grow by 7% this holiday season.
Least hot take of all time: Interruptions and rework are the worst. The modern dev pipeline is purpose-built to make collaboration easier and allow individuals and teams to work together to contribute to regular code pushes. This of course means lots of invention, feedback, creativity and iteration, all of which work best when they can be the point of current focus.
