Open Policy Agent (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive
summary
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a Rego-based policy engine with 250+ contributors, 800+ GitHub projects and 130M+ downloads that decouples decisions from enforcement and returns JSON decisions over HTTP. Recent additions include delta bundles, OCI bundle and disk storage support, a restricted strict mode and annotations. Gatekeeper shows major performance wins—measured on 100 templates / 1,000 constraints with up to 100x speedup in matching and 20x memory reduction—plus External Data for key‑value providers and the new Gator CLI for template/constraint testing.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:50What is OPA
- 6:06How does it work
- 9:40Project Updates
- 19:02Changes to frameworks
- 22:17Behavioral changes
- 22:54External data
- 24:38Gator cli
- 25:37Gator test
- 26:34Prometheus metrics
- 29:10Release cadence
- 30:10OPA usage
- 30:32OPA plugin
- 31:32How much load can OPA handle
- 32:12How many policies can OPA handle
- 33:02Why Rego
- 34:52OPA for User Experience
- 35:17OPA in the Front End
- 36:27Learning OPA
- 36:57Learning curve
- 37:57Questions
- 38:42Can OPA and SPSS coexist
- 39:57How do you know what policies are out there
- 40:27How do you manage OPA
