If you have used Open Policy Agent (OPA), you must have used OPA Playground to write and test out your Rego policies. I always wished for a feature where the policies in the playground can be directly applied in OPA. Basically, a control plane which allows policy authoring and enforcement easily. In KubeCon NA 2020, Styra (creators of OPA) launched a free edition of their Declarative Authorisation Service (DAS).

Whether you’re a developer or an IT professional (or a bit of both!), enforcing and managing authorization policies for the new containerized world is a whole different ball game than it was before. There’s the complex nature of modern applications — composed of multiple microservices, housed in containers — and then there’s the dynamic nature of platforms like Kubernetes, running those applications.

Continued Kubernetes adoption, unified authorization, DevSecOps redefined, open source dominance and more key changes for the enterprise Amid a year of unprecedented global change, it may seem incautious at best to make confident predictions about the future of cloud-native business. However, there are strong indications of the trends that 2021 will hold — precisely because they are predicated on significant enterprise change.

How companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Yelp, Chef, and Atlassian use OPA for ‘who-and what-can-do-what’ application policy. In the cloud-native space, microservice architectures and containers are reshaping the way that enterprises build and deploy applications. They function, in a word, differently than traditional monolithic applications.

Styra was founded with the simple premise that policy and authorization needed to be reinvented for the cloud-native environment. In order to secure and manage an exponentially more complex, containerized app development ecosystem, the team first had to build a new way to unify authorization policy at scale. The first step in achieving that was to create Open Policy Agent (OPA).

Open Policy Agent addresses Kubernetes authorization challenges with a full toolkit for integrating declarative policies into any number of application and infrastructure components. As more and more organizations move containerized applications into production, Kubernetes has become the de facto approach for managing those applications in private, public and hybrid cloud settings.

This is the second post in a two-part series about enforcing API authorization policies using Apigee, Okta and OPA. While the first post explained how to set up all three to work together, this post dives into detail on the policies that go along with the working code. The application we will be discussing is based on a hypothetical medical insurance provider Acme Health Care.

API gateways have become a standard component in modern application architectures. The gateway exposes application APIs to the Internet and serves as a logical place to enforce policy. This is a two-part series about enforcing API authorization policies in Apigee with Okta as the identity provider (IdP).

Cloud-native organizations embracing microservices are running into an unavoidable security question: how to handle microservice authorization controls? The central problem is this: unlike monolithic app structures, microservices architectures expose dozens more functionality through APIs, which can leave them vulnerable to attack.

I’m often asked from people outside the cloud-native space how the market is progressing and if Kubernetes is taking off or not. My answer is always the same: Kubernetes is absolutely the de facto approach to managing containerized applications, and, because of that, the market is expanding exponentially. We’re almost two-thirds of the way through 2020, and in the cloud-native space, it’s so far been the year of Kubernetes.