Access Policy Management at Cloud-Scale with Anders Eknert from Styra

The podcast episode of simplyblock's Cloud Commute features Chris Engelbert interviewing Anders Eknert. They discuss Anders' background and current role at Styra, the company behind the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. Anders lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, and has been involved with Styra for about three and a half years. He shares how his previous work led him to OPA due to a need for managing complex authorization requirements across diverse environments.

Styra, founded by the creators of OPA, focuses entirely on the OPA ecosystem. They offer two main products: Styra DAS (Declarative Authorization Service) and an enterprise version of OPA. Styra DAS helps manage OPA at scale, providing a control plane for policy management, lifecycle, and auditing. The enterprise OPA offers enhanced performance, lower memory usage, and direct integrations with data sources.

OPA itself is a policy engine that enables policies as code, allowing for decoupled and centralized policy management. Common use cases include authorization and infrastructure policies, where OPA acts as a layer between services to make policy decisions. The discussion highlights the importance of treating policy like any other code, allowing for testing, reviewing, and versioning.

Chris and Anders also discuss the functionality of OPA from a developer's perspective, explaining how it integrates with services to enforce policies. They touch on the broader benefits of a unified policy management system and how OPA and Styra DAS facilitate this at scale, ensuring consistency and control across complex environments.

If you have questions for Anders, you can find him here:

• Blog: https://www.eknert.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anderseknert
• X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/anderseknert
• Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/
• GitHub: https://github.com/anderseknert/

Styra and the Open Policy Agent can be found here:

• Styra Website: https://www.styra.com/
• Styra LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/styra/
• Styra X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/styrainc
• OPA Website: https://www.openpolicyagent.org/
• OPA X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/openpolicyagent
• OPA GitHub: https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa

The Cloud Commute Podcast is presented by simplyblock (https://www.simplyblock.io)