DevOps and platform teams are more strained than ever, and as a result, need better tools than ever. These teams are required to develop, provide access to, and secure a number of resources — while remaining good stewards to application developers. Beyond that, they are often tasked with overseeing their organization’s shift to the cloud. And as that shift takes place, DevOps teams will need to shift their compliance standards to the cloud.
The many benefits of microservices architecture, such as improved scalability and agility, explain why organizations are migrating from the traditional monolithic architecture. However, these benefits come at the cost of increased complexity, especially regarding security. According to an O’Reilly survey, 56% of respondents considered increased complexity the greatest challenge in developing microservices.
As organizations rapidly transform the way they build and deploy applications in pursuit of greater business agility and increased speed to market, they face significant challenges implementing effective authorization controls throughout microservices environments and the infrastructure they run on. For Identity and Access Management (IAM) teams, stitching together different data sources and transforming them for authorization purposes is complex and time-consuming.
TL;DR: AWS Object Lamba can authorize requests to S3. We can create an Object Lambda that calls Open Policy Agent (OPA) to get a policy decision. This delegation allows us to implement policies using Rego and manage them in Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS).
This year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA featured new and exciting updates from the open source community, and we also hosted our own event, Cloud Native Policy Day with OPA, hosted by Styra. At Cloud Native Policy Day, we were fortunate to host a full roster of Open Policy Agent (OPA) luminaries from leading companies to speak at our event, and we wanted to share some high-level takeaways from their talks– each of which showcased unique ways of using OPA.
With policy as code, policies can be managed and automated using code written in a high-level language. It is a programmatic method of uniformly defining and enforcing policies throughout cloud-native applications and their infrastructure.
As enterprises move their applications to the cloud, they’re adopting finer-grained authorization for their users in order to better secure architectures and applications. Today, many, if not most, organizations use a role-based access control (RBAC) model for secure access. But as the push for fine-grained control grows, many organizations are asking: should we transition to attribute-based access control (ABAC)?
Adopting a fine-grained policy-as-code authorization approach based on Open Policy Agent (OPA)– the leading open-source policy engine– is a huge step forward in building microservices applications that run reliably and securely.
As you probably know by now, PodSecurityPolicy has been deprecated from Kubernetes for over a year, since the release of Kubernetes 1.21. In short PSP was an admission controller that let cluster managers control security by managing pod-specific policy. Like most other admission controllers, PSP could specify requirements one must meet to enter a pod, and deny any requests which don’t meet that requirement. In rare cases, PSP could also modify pod fields, changing requirements for access.
Authentication and authorization are two complementary and critical parts of securing cloud-native applications and infrastructure. Yet, there can be some confusion between these terms. The importance of cybersecurity approaches, such as Zero Trust and the principle of least privilege, make it critical to understand and implement appropriate authorization and authentication processes across cloud-native development.
