Policy-Enforced Pipelines with Open Policy Agent (OPA)
Open Policy Agent (OPA) pipelines give teams total control over how cloud-native systems operate. They enforce rules before deployment, inside CI/CD, and even within microservices. With OPA in your pipeline, compliance is not a report—it’s a gate that only clean, approved changes pass through.
OPA is a lightweight, open source policy engine. It uses a declarative language called Rego to define rules about infrastructure, Kubernetes manifests, Terraform plans, and application configs. These rules integrate directly into pipelines for automated checks. No manual approvals. No blind trust.
By embedding OPA in pipelines, you can:
- Block insecure configurations before they hit production
- Apply security standards across all environments
- Enforce cost and resource limits in infrastructure code
- Ensure container images meet vulnerability thresholds
- Require explicit tags, labels, and metadata for deployments
An OPA pipeline runs these checks as part of build, test, or deploy stages. If a change breaks policy, the pipeline fails fast. This prevents drift, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps. It also removes the bottleneck of human review while keeping governance intact.
Integration is straightforward. Popular CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and Argo Workflows can run OPA as a step or sidecar. You define your Rego policies, mount them in the workflow, and evaluate incoming code or configurations. Results are immediate, in the same logs engineers already monitor.
OPA pipelines scale across teams and services. Instead of scattering rules in code, scripts, and docs, you centralize them in version-controlled policies. That gives both development and security a single source of truth. It also ensures consistency: the same rules that run in staging will guard production.
As infrastructure grows more dynamic, pipelines must do more than ship code— they must decide what is allowed to ship. OPA gives that decision-making power to the same automation you trust to deploy your systems.
See OPA pipelines in action without building everything yourself. Check out hoop.dev and run a live policy-enforced pipeline in minutes.