Day Two Cloud 145: Using Open Policy Agent For Cloud-Native Policy Enforcement

Today’s Day Two Cloud explores the Open Policy Agent (OPA), an open-source project that serves as a policy engine for cloud-native environments. According to the OPA Web site, OPA “provides a high-level declarative language that lets you specify policy as code and simple APIs to offload policy decision-making from your software. You can use OPA to enforce policies in microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, API gateways, and more.” OPA is a graduated project in the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation. Our guest is Anders Eknert, Developer Advocate at Styra. Sytra created OPA. We discuss: * Anders’ own journey to OPA * OPA’s role in policy enforcement and security * The need for policy enforcement within microservices * How OPA decouples policy and enforcement * Rego, OPA’s policy language * OPA use cases * More Sponsor: StrongDM StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack. StrongDM proxies connections between your infrastructure and Sysadmins, giving your IT team auditable, policy-driven, IaC-configurable access to whatever they need, wherever they are. Find out more at StrongDM.com/packetpushers. Sponsor: ITProTV Start or grow your IT career with online training from ITProTV. From CompTIA to Cisco and Microsoft, ITProTV offers more than 5,800 hours of on-demand training. Courses are listed by category, certification, and job role. Day Two Cloud listeners can sign up and save 30% off all plans. Go to itpro.tv/daytwocloud and use promo code CLOUD to save 30%. Tech Bytes: VMware Stay tuned for our sponsored Tech Bytes conversation with VMware. We discuss vRealize Network Insight Universal. Our focus is the SaaS version of vRealize Network Insight and how it can help with your cloud migration project. Show Links: Open Policy Agent Open Policy Agent Docs @openpolicyagent – OPA on Twitter OPA Slack Styra Academy The OPA AWS CloudFormation Hook Transcript: [00:00:00.970] – Ethan Sponsor StrongDM is secure infrastructure access for the modern stack, StrongDM proxies connections between your infrastructure and sysadmins, giving your It team auditable policy driven IAC configurable access to whatever they need, wherever they are. Find out [email protected] PacketPushers this episode of Day Two Cloud is brought to you in part by ITPro TV start or grow your It career with online It training from ITProTV. And we have a special offer for all you amazing Day Two Cloud listeners. Sign up and save 30% off all plans just before we start the show today. Keep listening past the end, we’ve got a tech bite where we’re going to be chatting with VMware. Don’t miss it. [00:01:01.250] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today we’re talking about OPA. Hey, OPA, it’s the OPA, the open policy agent. And we have Anders Ecknert, a developer advocate from SteerA to steer us through the conversation and the nuances of what OPA is. What jumped out to you. [00:01:19.920] – Ethan Ethan,