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Open Policy Agent: Microservices Authorization Simplified

With microservices development, I often came across a problem with implementing Authentication and Authorization (A&A). We want a robust and centrally managed authentication and authorization strategy. But, the distributed nature of the application makes it difficult to implement. In this post, I will explore how Open Policy Agent can help simplify the authorization problem.

Let’s take a quick look at the definition for Authentication and Authorization. Authentication refers to identifying the user (“who”), whereas Authorization refers to determining the level of access an authenticated user has (“what”).

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Leveraging Kubernetes Open Policy Agent

One of the big challenges of going cloud-native and using containers is enforcing security and usage policies. This is an easy task to complete when the cloud infrastructure is relatively simple and has only a limited number of users. Once the cloud environment becomes complex or there are more end-users utilizing cloud resources, having clear governance is a must.

In Kubernetes, policy management and governance are easy thanks to the Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper project or Gatekeeper in short. It enables compliance checks and more thorough management of policies without sacrificing agility or ease of use. Gatekeeper acts as the agent that validates CRD-based policies run by Open Policy Agent.