OPA everywhere! Exploring new opportunities in policy evaluation
summary
Claim: compiling Rego to a low‑level IR lets policies run inside apps with near‑native speed but requires writing an evaluator and losing OPA’s management features. Tools: Rego → OPA → IR, optional WASM, and Joel (Clojure) as a JVM/JS evaluator prototype. Numbers: OPA binary ~50MB, typical sidecar call 1–2 ms latency, Joel currently passes ~1200 compliance tests and implements ~110 builtins. Result: IR enables native integration and lower latency but needs extra engineering and is not yet turnkey.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction to speaker
- 2:24Distributed system challenges
- 10:03Authorization approaches
- 17:31Introduction to OPA
- 23:33Rego policy language demo
- 37:21Deployment and performance
- 46:46Open intermediate format
- 54:47Conclusion and Q&A








