Book Image

Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption

By : Ricardo Ferreira
Book Image

Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption

By: Ricardo Ferreira

Overview of this book

Policy as Code (PaC) is a powerful paradigm that enables organizations to implement, validate, and measure policies at scale. Policy Design in the Age of Digital Adoption is a comprehensive guide to understanding policies, their design, and implementation for cloud environments using a DevOps-based framework. You'll discover how to create the necessary automation, its integration, and which stakeholders to involve. Complete with essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will help you understand policies and how new technologies such as cloud, microservices, and serverless leverage Policy as Code. You'll work with a custom framework to implement PaC in the organization, and advance to integrating policies, guidelines, and regulations into code to enhance the security and resilience posture of the organization. You'll also examine existing tools, evaluate them, and learn a framework to implement PaC so that technical and business teams can collaborate more effectively. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the confidence to design digital policies across your organizational environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Foundation
5
Section 2: Framework
10
Section 3: Tooling

Chapter 9: A Primer on Open Policy Agent

After the primer on policy engines in the previous chapter, we will now focus on Open Policy Agent (OPA), the most popular policy engine out there.

This chapter will briefly introduce OPA, its architecture, how it can be used, and the main benefits and challenges, while also going a bit deeper into its policy language, Rego, which is used to build coercive instruments for access control.

Since Rego is the key to expressing policies, we will show some snippets and discuss them. OPA contains a playground that we will leverage, and you can also follow along to solidify your understanding of the concepts explained.

We will also talk about how integration with IT environments and platforms nowadays is becoming more complex due to the numerous products and services, and the shift to microservices requiring an overlay that can deal with all the pieces. We will discuss the ecosystem and how we can integrate OPA with microservices, CI/CD, service...