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.

Following up from our previous Kubernetes Essential Policy Toolkit Deeper Dive, we’re excited to announce upcoming enhancements to Terraform use cases in Styra DAS and take a deeper dive into the Styra DAS Terraform policy toolkit. With the enhanced Styra DAS Terraform policy toolkit, we’re making it even easier for platform engineering and cloud infrastructure teams to support their company’s application developers while delivering secure and compliant infrastructure configurations.

Today, we launched Styra Load, an enterprise-grade OPA distribution built to provide resource-efficient performance for data-heavy authorization. Designed to mitigate the effects of data-heavy workloads, our new offering allows you to reduce infrastructure costs, optimize authorization performance and minimize enterprise risk with powerful live impact analysis, while connecting natively to existing data sources.

Access control is the process of dictating who or what can access resources and assets and what actions are allowed once access is granted. An access control policy, by way of an enforcement mechanism, puts those parameters into action. Safeguarding data, IT systems and applications requires a robust access control solution, especially where financial, medical and other sensitive data is concerned.