Open Policy Agent
As we have seen in the previous chapter, there are a lot of policy engines out there. OPA is one of the most popular policy engines out there and will be the focus of this chapter.
This section will discuss OPA, its architecture, and components, with a brief tutorial on installing it and testing some policies. Next, we will show some use cases of deploying OPA and the use cases it can help with.
Introduction
OPA is an open source project created as an abstraction layer for policy decisions across different environments, applications, and microservices. OPA's main strength is building on its expressive language, Rego, which we will discuss in another section.
As we discussed in previous chapters, a policy can be a set of best practices, procedures, guardrails, and standards to help achieve a goal. These policy engines, such as OPA, focus more on authorization, which corresponds to coercive instruments.