OPAL VS cedar-agent

Open Policy Administration Layer (OPAL) is an OSS project created to aid with Policy Engine management, which keeps them updated in real-time with data and policy updates. Supporting both OPA and AWS’ Cedar, OPAL offers two important features:\

Another tool that can help you deploy a Policy as Code-based solution in 2024 is OPAL, the Open Policy Administration Layer. OPAL is an open-source project that provides a comprehensive policy-based service for applications. With one click, you can deploy a full architecture of a Git-based centralized policy store with decentralized policy engines running as a sidecar with your applications. OPAL also provides a unified architecture to sync all the data you need with the policy engines.

Inspired by Braden’s post, this blog explores the journey of Reddit's team, focusing on their strategic decisions, the challenges they encountered, and the innovative solutions they crafted. Alongside Reddit's in-house efforts, we also examine OPAL, an open-source solution that aligns with the functionality of Reddit’s system, presenting an alternative approach for organizations seeking sophisticated authorization management solutions in the field of Ad Tech.

We reviewed how Netlfix used OPA with a a replication pattern; and decided to create a similar yet more extensible and event-driven solution - and so OPAL (Open Policy Administration Layer) was born - creating a scalable, zero-trust way to manage policy engines and their policy/data at scale.

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We are considering connecting this provider to our open-source tool OPAL. Are you using OPAL? Do you think such integration would be beneficial?

One example of such an administration tool is OPAL, an open policy administration layer that works with OPA. OPAL tracks changes in external services and propagates the data to the OPA PDPs so the authorization requests can handle existing data and return faster results.

Open Policy Administration Layer (OPAL), is an open source administration layer for Policy Engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA), and AWS' Cedar Agent that detects changes to both policy and policy data in real time and pushes live updates to those agents. Using Git repositories and GitOps as a method for rule storage, OPAL provides several benefits:

This is_authorize function is calling the Cedar-agent, an engine that can evaluate the policy and return the decision. The function is generic and can be used with any policy model.

There is also open source project called cedar-agent to make life easier when working with Cedar policies.