“Open Policy Agent or OPA was designed to be a policy engine that enables users to have a unified solution to authorization and policies that are across that Cloud Native stack. That’s super important because when you start thinking about putting policies in place for different applications running in different clouds, or different platforms using different databases, different microservices built on different programming languages, what you really want to be able to do is have a single cogent way of solving that authorization problem of who (people) or what (machines) can perform which actions on that software. That’s why OPA is so powerful,” said Tim Hinrichs, Co-founder and CTO of Styra.

Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce and monitor policy across their cloud-native environments. With a combination of open source (Open Policy Agent) and commercial solutions (Declarative Authorization Service), Styra provides security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect applications, as well as the infrastructure they run on. Styra policy-as-code solutions let developers, DevOps and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. In this interview, we hosted Tim Hinrichs, Co-founder and CTO of Styra, to dive deeper into the role of Open Policy Agent in the proliferation of cloud native technologies.

Tim Hinrichs is the co-founder of the Open Policy Agent project and CTO of Styra. Before that, he co-founded the OpenStack Congress project and was a software engineer at VMware. Tim spent the last 18 years developing declarative languages for different domains such as cloud-computing, software-defined networking, configuration management, web security, and access-control. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2008. Follow him on Twitter

Guest: Tim Hinrichs
Company: Styra
Topics: Cloud Native, Open Policy Agent, OPA, Kubernetes