A policy is a set of rules that governs the behavior of a service. Policy enablement empowers users to read, write, and manage these rules without needing specialized development or operational expertise. When your users can implement policies without recompiling your source code, then your service is policy enabled.

What is Policy?

All organizations have policies. Policies are essential to the long-term success of organizations because they encode important knowledge about how to comply with legal requirements, work within technical constraints, avoid repeating mistakes, and so on.

In their simplest form, policies can be applied manually based on rules that are written down or conventions that are unspoken but permeate an organization’s culture. Policies may also be enforced with application logic or statically configured at deploy time.

What is Policy Enablement?

Policy-enabled services allow policies to be specified declaratively, updated at any time without recompiling or redeploying, and enforced automatically (which is especially valuable when decisions need to be made faster than humanly possible). They make deployments more adaptable to changing business requirements, improve the ability to discover violations and conflicts, increase the consistency of policy compliance, and mitigate the risk of human error.

A policy-enabled service is able to answer questions by comparing relevant input from its environment to policy statements written by administrators. For example, a cloud computing service could answer questions such as:

• Can I add compute capacity?
• In what regions can I add compute capacity?
• Which instances are currently running in the wrong region?

What is OPA?

OPA is a lightweight general-purpose policy engine that can be co-located with your service. You can integrate OPA as a sidecar, host-level daemon, or library.

Services offload policy decisions to OPA by executing queries. OPA evaluates policies and data to produce query results (which are sent back to the client). Policies are written in a high-level declarative language and can be loaded into OPA via the filesystem or well-defined APIs.

Why use OPA?