Fine-grained authorization for Cloud Native Systems

Every organization needs to enforce policies throughout their systems. If organizations don't enforce policies well they face regulatory fines, security breaches, and downtime (which no one wants to be responsible for!)

This talk introduces the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. OPA is a general-purpose policy engine that improves control and visibility over services across the stack. The talk will explain how OPA works and how it integrates with disperate projects like Kubernetes, Ceph, and Istio. Finally, the talk will include a demo around microservice API authorization as well as a discussion of how OPA can be integrated with authorization standards like OAuth to achieve a fast and flexible authorization model.

Speakers:

Torin Sandall - Co-founder of the Open Policy Agent project
Ash Narkar - Core contributor to the Open Policy Agent project

Torin Sandall is the co-founder and technical lead of the Open Policy Agent project. Torin has spent over 10 years working as a software engineer on large-scale distributed systems projects. Previously, Torin was a senior engineer at Cyan, Inc. where he designed and developed core components of their SDN/NFV platform. Torin has given several talks on policy-related topics at KubeCon, LinuxCon, Velocity, and more.

Ash has 5 years of experience working on large-scale distributed systems. Ash is a Software Engineer at Styra, Inc and has previously worked for Verizon Labs and Cyan, Inc. Ash has given a OPA talk at the CNCF End User Community Meeting.

Agenda:

6.15 PM - 6.45 PM: Food/Networking
6.45 PM - 7.45 PM: Talk