We recently released Enterprise OPA, the drop-in enterprise edition of Open Policy Agent (OPA). With Enterprise OPA, we aim to solve several challenges large organizations encounter when using OPA. These include performance and memory usage when using large datasets, keeping authorization data up to date and performing policy updates in a safe way.
A common use case our customers have for Open Policy Agent (OPA) is access control. The problem of access control is generally broken down into two parts, authentication and authorization. Authentication is about making sure we can trust someone’s stated identity, authorization is making decisions about who can do what.
A microservice application comprises small autonomous services that communicate with each other through application programming interfaces (APIs) — as standalone services or via a service mesh. These API calls or requests raise security and compliance concerns if not appropriately secured through authentication and authorization checks. Service-to-service authorization is the process of determining what actions an authenticated service is allowed to perform based on pre-defined policies.
Many engineers like to stick to the IDE or the command line as they use those for their daily tasks instead of jumping into yet another SaaS web application. To improve the Styra DAS experience for them, we developed Styra Link, a tool that allows users to perform most of the tasks of the Styra DAS UI and manage OPA from the CLI or from VS Code. Styra DAS offers a fully integrated policy authoring and lifecycle management experience in a web-based UI.
As enterprises build and run cloud-native applications on Kubernetes, platform engineering teams are responsible for empowering dozens, hundreds or even thousands of developers to rapidly configure the right infrastructure resources to run mission-critical applications. At the same time, today’s complex threat landscape and strict regulatory environment make it increasingly difficult for developers to configure secure and compliant infrastructure.
