Uptime. Reliability. Efficiency. These used to be perks, elements of forward-thinking and premium-level enterprises. Now they’re a baseline expectation. Today, consumers expect information, resources, and services to be available on-demand, updated in real time, and accessible without fuss. Imagine trying to Google something or place an order from Amazon only to be told, “Please try again in 48 hours. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

In November 2019, just after Styra raised $14 million in our Series A funding round, I wrote that the market’s move away from monolithic apps and adoption of containerized cloud-native application architectures was going to provide “a substantial market opportunity for policy and authorization to evolve.” A lot has happened since I wrote that, and I’m happy to report that while our Series A round showed the market opportunity, our latest round of funding proves the validity of t

Open Policy Agent, or OPA, is an open source, general purpose policy engine. OPA decouples policy decisions from other responsibilities of an application, like those commonly referred to as business logic. OPA works equally well making decisions for Kubernetes, Microservices, functional application authorization and more, thanks to its single unified policy language. So what’s a policy engine? And what’s policy? A policy can be thought of as a set of rules.

Kubernetes developers and platform engineers are typically under a metric ton of pressure to keep app deployments humming at a brisk pace. With the scale and power of Kubernetes, this can feel daunting. Maybe you’re a retailer launching a new e-commerce feature for a huge sale. Maybe you’re a bank that’s scaling a finance app worldwide. In either case, compromises always get made in the interest of speed and schedules.