Sign in Subscribe
Concepts

Self-Hosting Open Policy Agent: Full Control, Zero Compromise

Andrios Robert

• 1 min read

OPA is a general-purpose policy engine that lets you define and enforce rules across APIs, microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and more. Hosting OPA yourself keeps your policy logic and data entirely in your own infrastructure. It removes external latency and third-party risk. You set the update schedule, monitor performance, and integrate with your stack without friction.

Core benefits

  • Security isolation: Your rules and decision logs stay inside your network.
  • Performance consistency: Low latency since evaluations happen in your environment.
  • Custom integrations: Connect to your auth service, config management, and observability stack without vendor constraints.
  • Version control: Deploy and roll back policy updates like any other codebase.

Key components of an OPA self-hosted setup

  1. OPA binaries or containers: Deploy on bare metal, VMs, or Kubernetes.
  2. Policy definition in Rego: Write rules that describe exactly what is allowed or denied.
  3. Data bundles: Package and serve the data OPA needs for decisions. Store them locally or deliver via your internal CDN.
  4. Decision API: Your services send queries to OPA, which responds instantly with allowed/denied outcomes based on your rules.
  5. Logging and metrics: Feed decision records to your observability system for audits and monitoring.

Deployment patterns

  • Sidecar: Run OPA next to each service for isolated decision-making.
  • Central service: Deploy a single OPA cluster to serve multiple apps via HTTP API.
  • Kubernetes admission controller: Use OPA Gatekeeper for enforcing policies on workloads before they run.

Performance tuning

  • Preload all needed data at startup.
  • Minimize external lookups during evaluations.
  • Cache frequently used decisions when policy allows.
  • Monitor CPU, memory, and decision timings to adjust hardware or scale.

Security best practices

  • Run OPA with least privilege access.
  • Require TLS for the API.
  • Sign and verify bundles before deployment.
  • Rotate keys and credentials regularly.

Getting started fast

You can self-host OPA with just a containerized image and a few lines of config. Pull from Docker Hub or build from source, mount your policy files, and start serving decisions in minutes. For Kubernetes, install with Helm and connect Gatekeeper for cluster policy enforcement.

Run your policies where you control everything—no delays, no blind spots. See your Open Policy Agent self-hosted instance live without writing boilerplate. Try it now with hoop.dev and get it running in minutes.