Getting Started with Open Policy Agent: A Beginner’s Guide to Policy Enforcement with Rego
Introduction
Organizations are currently caught in a wave of technology transformations be it cloud-native architectures, microservices, dynamic infrastructures, Artificial Intelligence. These are becoming the norm and maintaining consistent and robust control policies across an organization is a complex challenge. Be it security policies or compliance policies, the current federated use of new technologies within an organization makes it difficult to implement an overarching control policy to ensure the product meets all requirements before it rolls out to the production environment. I have personally worked with handful of such tools and each one of them comes with its custom boilerplates, implementation approaches thereby making them the best tool to be adopted across the Enterprise. I recently had an opportunity to work with an open source policy agent and I believe this could be that policy management tool which the entire enterprise can get behind. Open Policy Agent (OPA), a versatile, open-source policy engine provides a unified framework for policy enforcement across the stack. In this blog, I will introduce you to OPA and its powerful policy language, Rego, helping you install the tool, write your first policy, and validate it — all while ensuring your systems stay compliant…
