We recently surveyed the Open Policy Agent (OPA) community to gauge use case adoption, pain points and generally help guide the project. The recent survey results reflect how much the community has grown over the past year. This time we received 204 responses from over 150 organizations across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa. Over 90% of respondents indicated they are in some stage of OPA adoption (e.g., pre-production, production, etc.).

We’ve had an exciting past six months at Styra, from a Series A funding announcement to tremendous growth in the Open Policy Agent (OPA) community to new enhancements to our commercial product, Styra’s Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). All of this great momentum maps to our overarching vision of unifying authorization and policy for the cloud-native environment.

Talks focused on Open Policy Agent (OPA) are featured prominently in the agenda for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe—15 OPA-focused sessions were accepted from users at Google, City of Ottawa, Ada Health and more—signaling the importance of authorization in the cloud. While the event and those talks are now on hold until August, that doesn’t mean we should postpone learning more about authorization within applications, across Kubernetes clusters and on top of service mesh.

It’s clear from the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey that containerized environments have become mainstream, increasing automation at scale for companies. But, in the cloud-native environment, changes are constant and runtime is extremely dynamic. And while automation can help eliminate manual work, it can also replicate mistakes and risk at cloud scale.

Why the cloud-native architecture required a new policy language I recently started a new series on the Open Policy Agent (OPA) blog on why Rego, OPA’s policy language, looks and behaves the way it does. The blog post dives into the core design principles for Rego, why they’re important, and how they’ve influenced the language. I hope it will help OPA users better understand the language, so they can more easily jump into creating policy of their own.

The results are in! The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) seventh annual survey was recently released, showing that cloud-native technologies have become mainstream, and that deployments are maturing and increasing in size. This cloud-native shift means developers can more easily build complex applications, and organizations can deploy and manage these applications more quickly and with more automation than ever before. Don’t have time to read the whole thing? We’re here for you.

The RSA Conference—”Where the World Talks Security”—begins today. It’s a perfect time to take a hard look at security, and to investigate new solutions that help us all stay ahead of attacks and minimize risks. The team from Styra and Open Policy Agent will be there—eager to discuss advances in security for the cloud-native world.