Open Policy Agent
Open Policy Agent is an open-source policy engine that evaluates declarative policies against structured input to make authorization and other policy decisions.
Effective Platform Engineering
Open Policy Agent is an open-source policy engine that evaluates declarative policies independently of the application or infrastructure being governed.
- How it is used
- Provides policy decisions for point-of-change governance without requiring central ownership of development teams’ pipelines.
- How deep it goes
- Explains JSON inputs, Rego assertions, and admission-controller decisions with examples, while leaving agent deployment and policy publishing details aside.
- Examples
- Uses an age-based allow rule, a code-coverage threshold, and Kubernetes deployment-label checks.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via OPA and Rego to evaluate deployment requirements at an admission controller while preserving team-owned pipelines.
Read how Effective Platform Engineering explains Open Policy Agent →
Authorization in Action
Open Policy Agent is an open-source policy engine that evaluates declarative policies to make authorization and other policy decisions.
- How it is used
- Applies portable policy decisions across APIs, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, containers, gateways, and controllers.
- How deep it goes
- Explains Rego inputs and PARC elements in detail, then stops short of prescribing a built-in authorization structure.
- Examples
- Uses Kubernetes validation, API input restriction, admission control, CI/CD enforcement, and multi-platform infrastructure authorization.
- What you can do after
- Apply OPA and Rego to express portable policy logic over structured requests and infrastructure data.
Read how Authorization in Action explains Open Policy Agent →
Related concepts
- Regouses · Rego is a declarative query and policy language for expressing rules over structured data, commonly evaluated by Open Policy Agent and related systems.
- policy enginekind of · A policy engine is a software component that evaluates policies against requests, resources, actions, or other inputs and produces decisions or enforcement outcomes.
- policy serviceused by · A policy service is a software service that receives evaluation requests, applies declared policies, and returns authorization or enforcement decisions.
- Gatekeeperused by · Gatekeeper is an open-source Kubernetes admission controller that validates and enforces policies using Open Policy Agent.
- service meshused by · A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that manages communication and cross-cutting concerns such as traffic control, security, and observability between distributed services.
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