Continuous Policy Enforcement with OPA in Radius

The container spun up in seconds, but the policies were wrong. That’s when you realize security and control are not negotiable. Open Policy Agent (OPA) inside Radius gives you both without slowing your build pipeline.

OPA is a lightweight, general-purpose policy engine. Radius is an open-source application platform that simplifies the deployment of cloud-native apps across Kubernetes and beyond. Put them together and you get fine-grained, declarative control across every stage of your infrastructure.

With OPA in Radius, policy enforcement happens in real time. You write rules in Rego, OPA’s purpose-built query language. Radius hooks directly into your application and service deployments, intercepting requests and checking them against your policies before resources spin up or configurations take hold. This means RBAC is no longer limited to Kubernetes defaults—you define exactly who can do what, where, and when.

Key advantages of combining OPA with Radius:

• Consistent policy enforcement across heterogeneous environments.
• Decoupling of policy from application logic.
• Scalability for multi-team, multi-service deployments.
• Auditable decisions logged and stored automatically.

The technical path is straightforward. Install Radius in your cluster or workspace. Configure an OPA instance to run as a sidecar or centralized service. Register your policies by defining Rego rules for actions—deployments, updates, network access—and integrate them via Radius’ policy hooks. From that point, every resource managed by Radius passes through OPA checks before execution.

This setup hardens your platform without adding manual gates. Engineers keep shipping. Security teams gain clarity. The system enforces compliance continuously, not just at review time.

Don’t settle for implicit trust in complex systems. Put OPA inside Radius and make every deploy accountable. See it live in minutes at hoop.dev.