OPAL VS openfga

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.

If you find this post helpful,please give OPAL a star on GitHub! Your support helps us make access control easier and motivates us to write more articles like this one.

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.

This feels very much like OpenFGA[0]. I've been evaluating authorization tool for one of my side projects and honestly most tools feels like creating relationships in a graph-like database and querying to see if there is/isn't relationship between two entities. Is there more to this (besides the implementation details) or am I missing something from these tools?

[0] https://openfga.dev/

OpenFGA

OpenFGA is CNCF Sandbox authorization service inspired by Google Zanzibar

- https://authzed.com/spicedb/ - https://cerbos.dev/ - https://openfga.dev/ - https://www.permify.co/

Thanks for the answer. I played around with Keycloak for a bit and I saw that roles could be mapped as token claims, however for systems where you need fine grained access control (where roles are not enough) you need some other solution. One option could be to use an external authorization system. One such system could be OpenFGA https://openfga.dev/ that is based on Google Zanzibar https://research.google/pubs/pub48190/ research paper. This answer on SO is also helpful https://stackoverflow.com/a/75047064/10781180

OpenFGA is similar to Permify https://github.com/openfga/openfga