Policies around security, compliance, and operations are critical for production deployments, both for custom applications as well as the platforms those applications run on. A proven model from organizations around the world that are embracing Cloud-native application development practices is to use the Open Policy Agent (OPA) to express and enforce policy across multiple layers of the stack. Instead of policies being hard-coded in software, expressed through a myriad of different configuration formats, or simply treated as tribal knowledge, those policies are codified in a uniform, dedicated policy language and enforced wherever they need to be.

In this session, Tim Hinrichs, CTO and co-founder of Styra, and co-inventor of OPA will introduce the rationale behind OPA, describe the architectural design that allows OPA to run at scale in production, and show how to apply OPA to enforce policy within the application and within the Kubernetes platform. The audience will learn how to create their own policy pipelines using popular open-source tools to enforce OPA policy.

Presenters:

Tim Hinrichs