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Articles by Anders Eknert
Everything You Should Know About Microservices
As a result of microservices, service development, testing, problem-solving, deployment, and updating can be done by cross-functional teams independently, leading to faster deployment and troubleshooting. Automation of manual processes and the ability to share the workload reduces the overall development lifecycle. Application development greatly benefits from the growing popularity of microservices — a technique that involves a group of loosely coupled services.
Top 5 Access Control Challenges
Identity and access management (IAM) is an integral part of security systems. Without proper authentication and authorization, it would be impossible to practice cybersecurity principles such as zero trust and least privilege. By now, most organizations have a firm grasp on the identity part of IAM, including concepts like multi-factor and token-based authentication.
I have a plan! Exploring the OPA Intermediate Representation (IR) format
It isn’t an overstatement to say that the versatility of Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a key factor in its success. As a general purpose policy engine, OPA needs to handle inputs from a disparate set of systems — Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines or custom applications, to name a few — and deliver decisions in a format understood by that particular system.
4 Best Practices for Microservices Authorization
There are unquestionable advantages to cloud native technologies, but significant challenges as well. Case in point: microservices authorization. Anders Eknert Anders is a developer advocate at Styra with a long background in software development, security and identity systems in primarily distributed environments. When not in front of his computer, he enjoys watching football, cooking and Belgian beers.
4 Best Practices for Microservices Authorization
There are unquestionable advantages to cloud native technologies, but significant challenges as well. Case in point: microservices authorization. Anders is a developer advocate at Styra with a long background in software development, security and identity systems in primarily distributed environments. When not in front of his computer, he enjoys watching football, cooking and Belgian beers.
Open Policy Agent 2021, Year in Review
Open Policy Agent 2021, Year in Review Although we set the bar high in 2020, 2021 turned out to be just as eventful as we anticipated — both for the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project and the world around us. The year had barely started when OPA graduated in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This achievement further proves that OPA is a mature, general purpose solution for policy enforcement and the “de facto” standard for authorization in the cloud-native environment.
Five things you didn’t know about OPA
July 13, 2021 When introducing Open Policy Agent (OPA) to application developers and platform engineers, I normally end my presentation with a bulleted list detailing what I think are the best steps to take to start learning OPA and its declarative policy language, Rego.
5 Things You Didn't Know About Open Policy Agent - The New Stack
Anders Eknert Anders is a developer advocate at Styra with a long background in software development, security and identity systems in primarily distributed environments. When not in front of his computer, he enjoys watching football, cooking and Belgian beers.
Getting Open Policy Agent Up and Running
By: Anders Eknert Today, more organizations than ever use Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the de facto standard for policy enforcement across the cloud native stack. Agraduated projectfrom the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OPA has dozens of use cases — from Kubernetes guardrails, to microservices authorization, to infrastructure-as-a-service controls — that are leveraged by millions of users.
Getting Open Policy Agent Up and Running
Anders Eknert Anders is a developer advocate at Styra with a long background in software development, security and identity systems in primarily distributed environments. When not in front of his computer, he enjoys watching football, cooking and Belgian beers. Follow him on Twitter at @anderseknert Today, more organizations than ever use Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the de facto standard for policy enforcement across the cloud native stack.
Dynamic Policy Composition for OPA
A question that comes up every now and then is whether it’s possible to compose policies based on dynamic attributes provided with the request when querying Open Policy Agent (OPA) for decisions. Could we for example provide a group, team or role name as part of the input and have OPA evaluate all policies provided for that group, team or role, but no additional policies other than those? Imagine you have several teams in an organization, each of them with their own responsibilities.
OPA 101: Learn OPA Policy Authoring with Styra Academy
Whether you’re just starting to understand basic Rego language concepts or want to brush up on structuring policy-as-code rules, Styra Academy’s “OPA Policy Authoring” course lays out the fundamentals you need to know to get started. Before we dive in, let’s get a better understanding of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and some common use cases. What is OPA? OPA is an open source, general purpose policy engine for cloud native environments.
Linting Rego with... Rego!
One of my absolute favorite aspects of Open Policy Agent (OPA) is the general purpose nature of the tool. While commonly seen in deployments for Kubernetes admission control or application authorization, the large OPA ecosystem includes integrations with anything from databases, and operating systems to test frameworks and REST clients for most common languages.
Entitlements: Architecting Authorization
March 7, 2022 By its general purpose nature, Open Policy Agent (OPA) allows for a unified way of dealing with policy across a wide range of use cases. One particularly interesting use case for OPA, and one which will be the focus of this series of blogs, is that of application authorization (or entitlements, or simply, authorization).
5 OPA Deployment Performance Models for Microservices
Anders Eknert Anders Eknert is a developer advocate at Styra with a long background in software development, security and identity systems in primarily distributed environments. When not in front of his computer, he enjoys watching football, cooking and Belgian beers.
5 OPA Deployment Performance Models for Microservices
If you’re responsible for a microservices app, you may be familiar with the idea of a “latency budget.” This is the maximum latency, measured as total request time, that you need for the app to work, in order to meet your SLAs and keep stakeholders happy. For a stock trading or financial services app, this budget might be the barest of microseconds.
The Kubernetes authorization webhook
The webhook feature of the Kubernetes API offers a powerful mechanism to extend the modules that comprise the Kubernetes API servers with custom code for , authorization and admission control.
Integrating identity: OAuth2 and OpenID Connect in Open Policy Agent
In order to make policy decisions we commonly need to know the identity of the caller. Traditionally this has often been done by providing a user or client identifier along with the request, and using that identifier to look up further information like user details or permissions from a remote data source. While this model works fairly well for many applications, it scales poorly in distributed systems such as microservice environments.
Open Policy Agent 2020, year in review
Open Policy Agent, 2020 To call 2020 an eventful year would be an understatement. With a pandemic raging globally, we saw the tech community quickly adapt by moving largely online. Working from home became the new norm as meetings, conferences and other events also moved to digital channels. With so much of our lives now taking place online, the importance of our online platforms became overwhelmingly apparent.
The OPA AWS CloudFormation Hook
With a history spanning more than a decade, AWS CloudFormation has been the tool of choice for many organizations moving their cloud deployments from “point and click” configuration and towards managing infrastructure as code (IaC). As a mature technology, CloudFormation has spawned an ecosystem of tools, documentation and examples around the stack — whatever one is trying to accomplish in this space, chances are good they’ll find relevant resources on the topic.
What is Open Policy Agent?
Open Policy Agent, or OPA, is an open source, general purpose policy engine. OPA decouples policy decisions from other responsibilities of an application, like those commonly referred to as business logic. OPA works equally well making decisions for Kubernetes, Microservices, functional application authorization and more, thanks to its single unified policy language. So what’s a policy engine? And what’s policy? What is Policy? A policy can be thought of as a set of rules.
Six of My Favorite Styra Declarative Authorization Service Features
December 16, 2021 Open Policy Agent (OPA) allows developers to accelerate time to market and focus on their differentiated work, instead of spending their time figuring out how they are going to write bespoke authorization policies. With OPA handling authorization decisions across the stack, each service, app or platform API just has to handle enforcement of OPA decisions.
Policy-based infrastructure guardrails with Terraform and OPA
July 7, 2021 Few things in recent years have changed the game plan of the tech organization as much as the infrastructure as code movement. With infrastructure itself largely having moved into the cloud, automating provisioning, upgrades and management of that infrastructure was a natural next step.
The Power of Data: Calendar-based Policy Enforcement
October 7, 2021 A problem that is often discussed in the context of policy-as-code is how to get more people other than developers involved in policy authoring. Policy as code is still code, and while tooling and abstractions can help to some extent, the process still involves at least some level of development knowledge.
Standardized User Management With SCIM
An Introduction to System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM)What is SCIM?SCIM stands for “System for Cross-domain Identity Management” and is firstly a standardized way of representing users, groups, and anything related. Secondly, SCIM helps to standardize methods for acting on this data, such as creating, querying, searching, updating, and deleting.
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