OPAL VS vouch-proxy

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.

Building permissions and authorization can be a complex endeavor, but adhering to the best practices outlined in this article can lead to more robust and maintainable applications. It's vital to avoid the mentioned anti-patterns, adopt a declarative approach, and ensure that your authorization system is agnostic, generic, decoupled, unified, and easily auditable. By centralizing your authorization policies and leveraging open-source tools or cloud services like OPAL and Permit.io, you can streamline the implementation and management of your authorization system.

Look into vouch proxy

Vouch proxy is designed for this usage: https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy I don't think there are any nice UIs to configure it though so you'll need to be familiar with running it yourself.

Not sure this is a "best practice", but it lets me keep control of the Ingress resources inside their YAML configs. I've also layered Vouch Proxy into the ingress configurations to require SSO/MFA auth to access the resources behind the Ingress. Cloudflare has the ability to do this, but I found it cumbersome to keep track of the configs outside the K8s cluster.

I've used vouch proxy for my own stuff previously, before more recently moving to Cloudflare Access. vouch can be slightly janky at times to get working right, but once set up, it's been solid.

For example: nginx -> Vouch proxy -> KeyCloak -> Jellyfin

While this works, we were hoping to make access a bit easier with say an OpenID Connect SSO and reverse-proxy solution. I've seen Vouch Proxy, https://github.com/vouch/vouch-proxy which is really just SSO on top of nginx, but I'm wondering if there's a simpler way to do this.

You seem to be quite knowledgeable and a minimal provider with just the bare minimum would suffice for you. Have a look at Vouch Proxy, it does one thing and it does it well.