We’re really excited to announce that Open Policy Agent (OPA) is now a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! OPA joins projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, Prometheus, Fluentd (and ten others) that the CNCF recognizes for achieving broad adoption by the cloud-native community and maturity in its development processes. As the creators of OPA, we couldn’t be prouder!
In order to meet the increasing demand for OPA in EMEA, Styra and Amazic have signed a distributor agreement. With Amazic network of partners and resellers, Styra will significantly increase the reach and ability to support OPA users across the region. I’m excited to announce that Styra is now partnering with Amazic in Europe! Amazic empowers the IT individual by providing them with a unique platform of brands to discover, learn, purchase and market the latest IT technologies.
In order to make policy decisions we commonly need to know the identity of the caller. Traditionally this has often been done by providing a user or client identifier along with the request, and using that identifier to look up further information like user details or permissions from a remote data source. While this model works fairly well for many applications, it scales poorly in distributed systems such as microservice environments.
I think we can all agree that 2020 was a year like no other. For enterprises, we’ve had to transition to a fully digital and cloud-first business, whether it was our workspace, security, technology, culture, or (and in most cases) all of the above. Thankfully at Styra, we’re lucky to have such a great team, community, and customer base that helped us not only navigate 2020, but make it a success.
If you have used Open Policy Agent (OPA), you must have used OPA Playground to write and test out your Rego policies. I always wished for a feature where the policies in the playground can be directly applied in OPA. Basically, a control plane which allows policy authoring and enforcement easily. In KubeCon NA 2020, Styra (creators of OPA) launched a free edition of their Declarative Authorisation Service (DAS).
Whether you’re a developer or an IT professional (or a bit of both!), enforcing and managing authorization policies for the new containerized world is a whole different ball game than it was before. There’s the complex nature of modern applications — composed of multiple microservices, housed in containers — and then there’s the dynamic nature of platforms like Kubernetes, running those applications.
Continued Kubernetes adoption, unified authorization, DevSecOps redefined, open source dominance and more key changes for the enterprise Amid a year of unprecedented global change, it may seem incautious at best to make confident predictions about the future of cloud-native business. However, there are strong indications of the trends that 2021 will hold — precisely because they are predicated on significant enterprise change.
How companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Yelp, Chef, and Atlassian use OPA for ‘who-and what-can-do-what’ application policy. In the cloud-native space, microservice architectures and containers are reshaping the way that enterprises build and deploy applications. They function, in a word, differently than traditional monolithic applications.
Styra was founded with the simple premise that policy and authorization needed to be reinvented for the cloud-native environment. In order to secure and manage an exponentially more complex, containerized app development ecosystem, the team first had to build a new way to unify authorization policy at scale. The first step in achieving that was to create Open Policy Agent (OPA).
Open Policy Agent addresses Kubernetes authorization challenges with a full toolkit for integrating declarative policies into any number of application and infrastructure components. As more and more organizations move containerized applications into production, Kubernetes has become the de facto approach for managing those applications in private, public and hybrid cloud settings.
