Policies for the People: an OPA Amsterdam Meetup

Hello OPA community! The 3rd edition of our meetup is here, hosted by Miro and sponsored by Styra. We'll have some talks for you as well as food and drinks for some social time with fellow OPA enthusiasts.

Schedule:
18:00 - 18:30: Doors Open/Food and Drinks Served
18:30 - 18:50: Can It Be Done? Building Fine-grained Access Control for Backstage with OPA [Peter Macdonald]
18:50 - 19:10: Guarding the guardrails with Regal the Rego linter [Anders Eknert]
19:10 - 20:30: Social Hour

Thank you to our sponsors, Styra, the creators and maintainers of OPA, and our hosts, Miro.

Talks:
#1: Can It Be Done? Building Fine-grained Access Control for Backstage with OPA
Peter Macdonald, Developer @ VodafoneZiggo
Backstage has gained acclaim for its innovative software management, offering robust organization and visualization features complemented by a diverse plugin ecosystem. However, implementing fine-grained permissions within its community remains a challenge. This talk focuses on integrating Open Policy Agent (OPA) to enhance Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) within Backstage. Instead of traditional TypeScript-based policy definitions, we'll explore how OPA's domain-specific policy language can expedite and standardize policy implementations across the platform.

#2: Guarding the guardrails with Regal the Rego linter
Anders Eknert, Senior Developer Advocate @ Styra
Policy is commonly referred to as “guardrails” — and for good reasons! Codifying policy and having it enforced provides safety measures not only in terms of improving security, but just as much to protect us from our own mistakes. But who’s guarding these guardrails? What if we could use Rego to write policy for Rego itself, providing us with the same type of safety net that we want for our applications and infrastructure? These ideas eventually led to the creation of Regal — a new linter for Rego. The goal is both simple and ambitious: to help identify bugs and mistakes in policy, as well as to help users learn Rego. In this presentation, Anders present the story about how Regal came to be. Along the way, you’ll learn how linters work, and how Rego was used for linting Rego itself. In other words: how to build guardrails around your guardrails!