Lean Open Policy Agent: Fast, Lightweight Policy Enforcement

The rules are clear. The system enforces them in real time. No hidden code, no special cases, no manual overrides. Lean Open Policy Agent (OPA) is what makes this possible without slowing the machine down.

Lean OPA strips policy enforcement to its essentials—fast decisions, minimal footprint, straightforward deployment. It executes the Rego language without the bulky runtime, giving you the same powerful, declarative control but tuned for speed. This matters when your service calls hit hundreds or thousands per second and policy checks have to keep pace.

Instead of loading huge bundles or container-heavy builds, Lean OPA can embed directly into your application or run as a light sidecar. Policies stay standard—written in Rego—so you gain all the benefits of Open Policy Agent without sacrificing performance. Audit, compliance, access control, and feature gating become consistent across your stack.

Lean OPA integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines. Policies are versioned, tested, and shipped just like code. You can hot-reload policy files, or bake them into an immutable build. The reduced memory usage and shorter startup times make it well-suited for short-lived processes, serverless workloads, or high-scale microservices.

Security teams get deterministic enforcement. Developers keep full control over how and when policies run. Operations teams see lower resource use and fewer moving parts.

If you run Kubernetes clusters, Lean OPA slots into admission control without slowing pod creation. For APIs, it can run inline with single-digit millisecond decision times. For data pipelines, policies can guard transformations without breaking throughput.

Lean Open Policy Agent is not a different product—it’s the same proven OPA core, optimized. You keep every capability that matters: rich conditionals, input validation, and fine-grained role checking. You lose only the overhead.

Policy-as-code should not be fancy. It should be lean, reliable, and fast. Lean OPA delivers this balance.

See it live in minutes: run Lean Open Policy Agent with hoop.dev and turn policy enforcement into a simple, blazing-fast part of your workflow.