credentials-operator VS OPA (Open Policy Agent)

No more! The open-source intents-operator and credentials-operator enable you to achieve the same, except without all that work: do it all from Kubernetes, declaratively, and just-in-time, through the magic of IBAC (intent-based access control).

Otterize Credential Operator ( https://github.com/otterize/credentials-operator ) helps you automatically provision credentials as Kubernetes secrets (using a self-hosted SPIRE or a free SaaS solution). You can use pod annotations to determine the certificate's domain names (as well as many other properties). I think it is a straightforward approach to managing trust, especially for a relatively small cluster where you manage everything. (Full disclosure: I am one of the contributors to this project)

Have you taken a look at using SPIRE to create the TLS certificates and attesting about the workload identity? You could couple SPIRE server with the Otterize SPIRE integration operator to declaratively generate TLS certificates. This could be easier to deploy than a service mesh and sidecars, depending on your use case - what the clients are and what the servers are.

You could create JWT or mTLS-based identities, and then verify those in your middleware. If you are on Kubernetes, you might try using SPIRE together with the SPIRE integration operator to automatically issue identities as Kubernetes secrets, which you could then use to connect between services.

In practice, the technical part is implemented by the DevOps/platform team. The way in which you declare and get access to these secrets varies, but can be one of the cloud provider secret managers (e.g. AWS Secret Manager), Hashicorp Vault, or if you're on Kubernetes, could be something like cert-manager, Hashicorp Vault sidecars, or SPIRE coupled with the Otterize SPIRE integration.

If this seems a bit complicated, you could use SPIRE server to issue certificates and Otterize SPIRE integration operator to renew them in Kubernetes and update Secrets.

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)