azure-policy VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

Reference: https://github.com/Azure/azure-policy

I just came across this post over in the Azure subreddit and it gave me a good idea on one way to deal with rogue Azure subscriptions - just have them default into a Management Group where a policy is in-place that basically denies use of any and all services.

Oooo, that's a nice trick for the use of the root management group which usually has best practice to leave empty. I like that a lot! Could maybe pair that with the "deny all resource types" policy sample, and then even if someone does create a new subscription it's pretty much 100% neutered until someone pulls it out of the root management group and places it somewhere else.

Found a 2018 Github article - https://github.com/Azure/azure-policy/issues/102

MS Repo https://github.com/Azure/azure-policy/tree/master/built-in-policies/policyDefinitions

I can see here that is expecting azure-policy/AzureWindowsBaseline.mof at master · Azure/azure-policy · GitHub: "LOCAL SERVICE, NETWORK SERVICE". However, that would exclude the web app pools.

Azure shared with us a GitHub repository contains built-in samples of Azure Policies that can be used as reference for creating and assigning policies to your subscriptions and resource groups.

The only real way you'll be able to do this is via an Azure Policy, alongside a deny effect - where your policy would restrict based on the type field, with the values passed in via an array parameter (example)

How can we handle this? Are there any mechanisms to prevent or at least to some extent safeguard this kind of issues without falling back to a manual workflow? There is. One huge advantage of sticking to (de-facto) standards like Terraform is that first we are probably not the first ones to come up with this question and second there is a huge ecosystem around Terraform that might help us with such challenges. And for this specific scenario the solution is the Open Policy Agent. Let us take a closer look how the solution could look like.

A popular Policy-as-Code tool for Terraform is OPA, everyone's favorite versatile open-source policy engine that enforces security and compliance policies across your cloud-native stack, making it easier to manage and maintain consistent policy enforcement in complex, multi-service environments.

Harness Policy As Code uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) as the central service to store and enforce policies for the different entities and processes across the Harness platform. In this section, you will define a policy that will deny a pipeline execution if there is no approval step defined in a deployment stage.

OPA: While OPA is an open-source, general-purpose policy engine capable of enforcing unified and context-aware policies throughout the stack, it can also accept and output data in formats such as JSON, effectively functioning as a tool for generating or modifying configurations. Although it does not provide out-of-the-box schema definition support, it allows the integration of JsonSchema definitions.

In essence, container image signing involves adding a digital stamp to an image, affirming its authenticity. This digital assurance guarantees that the image is unchanged from creation to deployment. In this blog, I'll explain how to sign container images for Kubernetes using Cosign and the Open Policy Agent. I will also share a tutorial that demonstrates these concepts.

In this post we will explores two powerful solutions for addressing this issue: the Open Policy Language (OPA) and Google’s Zanzibar.

Rego is a declarative query language from the makers of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) accepted OPA as an incubation-level hosted project in April 2019, and OPA graduated from incubating status in 2021.

Now there are more subdivided practice: * Policy as Code: Sentinel, OPA * Database as Code: bytebase * AppConfiguration as Code: KusionStack, Acorn * ...... (Welcome to add more)