In this article, you will learn about how to achieve high-throughput, real-time authorization. You should gain a basic understanding of the different protocols for interacting with the Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Styra Enterprise OPA APIs, as well as how and when to use different options. We will also cover the strengths of different protocol choices, and where they may make sense in your system architecture.

Two web-scale companies have recently shared how they solved mission-critical authorization challenges using Open Policy Agent (OPA). These accounts validate the value of what we’ve built with OPA and give important blueprints for engineers looking to address similar challenges. We consider these required reading for anyone considering or using OPA at scale. In this post we review these two case studies to highlight common patterns and important differences.