An OPA design pattern, as detailed in a previous post, gives you an architectural solution to solve one or more common policy problems. In this blog post, we describe what we call the Offline Configuration Authorization design pattern for OPA. Remember that each OPA design patterns covers the following information.

Enterprises are shifting rapidly to the cloud in order to increase scalability, improve efficiency and lower their costs. In the process, every company has become a software company — constantly building and updating new software — while the cloud has radically transformed how software is built. Oftentimes, the modern cloud-native application will be made up of several (or hundreds of) microservices, while being hosted on dynamic scaling platforms like Kubernetes.

Most enterprises are well on their way towards a cloud operating model. Many have moved significant parts of their applications to one (or more) public clouds. Yet, many resources will never be destined for a central public cloud — and for good reason. We now see two factors that affect where and how many resources will ultimately be deployed (hint: it’s at the edge).

In the past, responsibility for data privacy and security fell on non-development teams, like IT, security or compliance. But this is changing. Thanks to the adoption of cloud native technologies and trends like policy-as-code, developers are more focused on security than ever. According to the Styra 2022 Cloud-Native Alignment Report, over half of developers think their organization should enhance its data privacy efforts in the next 12 months.