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You're reading from  Kubernetes – An Enterprise Guide - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inDec 2021
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803230030
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (2):
Marc Boorshtein
Marc Boorshtein
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Marc Boorshtein

Marc Boorshtein has been a software engineer and consultant for 20 years and is currently the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Tremolo Security, Inc. Marc has spent most of his career building identity management solutions for large enterprises, U.S. Government civilian agencies, and local government public safety systems.
Read more about Marc Boorshtein

Scott Surovich
Scott Surovich
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Scott Surovich

Scott Surovich has been involved in the industry for over 25 years and is currently the Global Container Engineering Lead at a tier 1 bank as the Global on-premises Kubernetes product owner architecting and, delivering cluster standards, including the surrounding ecosystem. His previous roles include working on other global engineering teams, including Windows, Linux, and virtualization.
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What is OPA and how does it work?

OPA is a lightweight authorization engine that fits well in Kubernetes. It didn't get its start in Kubernetes, but it's certainly found a home there. There's no requirement to build dynamic admission controllers in OPA, but it's very good at it and there are extensive resources and existing policies that can be used to start your policy library.

This section provides a high-level overview of OPA and its components with the rest of the chapter getting into the details of an OPA implementation in Kubernetes.

OPA architecture

OPA comprises three components – the HTTP listener, the policy engine, and the database:

Figure 8.1: OPA architecture

The database used by OPA is in memory and ephemeral. It doesn't persist information used to make policy decisions. On the one hand, this makes OPA very scalable since it is essentially an authorization microservice. On the other hand, this means that every...

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Kubernetes – An Enterprise Guide - Second Edition
Published in: Dec 2021Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803230030

Authors (2)

author image
Marc Boorshtein

Marc Boorshtein has been a software engineer and consultant for 20 years and is currently the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Tremolo Security, Inc. Marc has spent most of his career building identity management solutions for large enterprises, U.S. Government civilian agencies, and local government public safety systems.
Read more about Marc Boorshtein

author image
Scott Surovich

Scott Surovich has been involved in the industry for over 25 years and is currently the Global Container Engineering Lead at a tier 1 bank as the Global on-premises Kubernetes product owner architecting and, delivering cluster standards, including the surrounding ecosystem. His previous roles include working on other global engineering teams, including Windows, Linux, and virtualization.
Read more about Scott Surovich