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.

Microservices fundamentally changed the way we build modern applications. Before microservices, engineers had a small number of huge chunks of code that made up their application. Many apps were a single monolith of code, and some might have been broken out into a frontend, backend and database. So, when a team needed to update or patch their code, they had to do it slowly and with great care because any change to any part affected every other part of their app.

A recap of my time at the CNCF’s signature conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2021. What an amazing week at the first in-person KubeCon + CloudNativeCon since the pandemic started. This KubeCon set a precedent as one of the first major conferences to bring back an in-person component! The theme this time around was Resilience Realized, and they put this on display at the top of the convention hall.

In today’s cloud-native, app-first and remote-first world, it has become a considerably more complicated task to verify the identity of a user or a service, and determine policies that say what they are and aren’t allowed to do. Yet, the first half of that problem, authentication, for the most part, is already solved because of standards like Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OAuth and Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE).

Securing investors is always a challenge for startups. But for open-source companies, it’s even harder. Open-source companies need the right investors to innovate and enter new markets. But when you deal with a specific subset like open source, it can be difficult to find VCs with the required experience and knowledge. Those of us in the open-source community know it’s not just about the money — it’s also about continuing to grow the community.

A problem that is often discussed in the context of policy-as-code is how to get more people other than developers involved in policy authoring. Policy as code is still code, and while tooling and abstractions can help to some extent, the process still involves at least some level of development knowledge.

Back at KubeCon North America 2017, many speakers declared that 2018 would be “The Year of the Service Mesh”. Just a year later, in the 2019 CNCF Survey1, it was reported that 18% of surveyed organizations were using a service mesh in production, and by 20202 (the most recent survey published at the time of this writing) that number rose to 27%.