Devops teams are flocking to GitOps strategies to accelerate development time frames and eliminate cloud misconfigurations. They should adopt a similar ‘as-code’ approach to policy. One risk in deploying fleets of powerful and flexible clusters on constantly changing infrastructure like Kubernetes is that mistakes happen. Even minute manual errors that slip past review can have substantial impacts on the health and security of your clusters.

The webhook feature of the Kubernetes API offers a powerful mechanism to extend the modules that comprise the Kubernetes API servers with custom code for authentication, authorization and admission control.

Let’s say you were going to plan a security project. (Almost any project, really.) The following might be a pretty solid list of goals to aim for: That’s a pretty solid list - and might even read like “too much to ask for.” Yet, it’s exactly what SugarCRM received after deploying Styra DAS to manage Open Policy Agent (OPA) for Kubernetes guardrails.

How Open Policy Agent allows developer teams to write and enforce consistent policy and authorization across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments As multicloud strategies become fully mainstream, companies and dev teams are having to figure out how to create consistent approaches among cloud environments.

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.