Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across the entire cloud-native stack. It allows organizations to externalize policy decisions from their applications and infrastructure, enabling consistent, context-aware authorization and…
Key facts
- First appeared
- 2016
- Category
- technology
- Problem solved
- Open Policy Agent was created to solve the challenge of inconsistent, scattered, and hardcoded policy enforcement across distributed systems. Before OPA, authorization logic was often embedded directly within each service or application, leading to 'policy sprawl,' duplication, difficult auditing, and slow updates. OPA provides a single, standardized, and declarative way to define, distribute, and enforce policies, decoupling decision-making from service logic.
- Platforms
- Linux, Kubernetes, macOS, Docker (containerized), Windows
Related technologies
Notable users
- Google (via Anthos integrations)
- Microsoft
- Atlassian
- Capital One
- Netflix
- VMware
- AWS (via EKS Anywhere integrations)