⚡OPAL⚡

Open Policy Administration Layer

What is OPAL?

OPAL is an administration layer for Policy Engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA), and AWS’ Cedar Agent detecting changes to both policy and policy data in realtime and pushing live updates to your agents. OPAL brings open-policy up to the speed needed by live applications.

As your app’s data state changes (whether it’s via your APIs, DBs, git, S3 or 3rd-party SaaS services), OPAL will make sure your services are always in sync with the authorization data and policy they need (and only those they need).

Check out OPAL’s main site at OPAL.ac

OPAL Use Cases

OPAL is the easiest way to keep your solution’s authorization layer up-to-date in realtime. It aggregates policy and data from across the field and integrates them seamlessly into the authorization layer, and is microservices and cloud-native.

Here are some of the main use cases for using OPAL:

• End-to-End Fine-Grained Authorization service that can be used with any policy language or data store
• Google-Zanzibar support for Policy as Code engines such as OPA and AWS Cedar
• Streamline permissions in microservice architectures using centralized policy configuration with decentralized data sources and policy engines
• Manage and automate the deployment of multiple Open Policy Agent engines in a Cloud-Native environment

OPAL uses a client-server stateless architecture. OPAL-Servers publish policy and data updates over a lightweight (websocket) PubSub Channel, which OPAL-clients subscribe to via topics. Upon updates, each client fetches data directly (from the source) to load it into its managed Policy Engine instance.

OPA + OPAL == 💜

While OPA (Open Policy Agent) decouples policy from code in a highly-performant and elegant way, the challenge of keeping policy agents up-to-date remains.
This is especially true in applications, where each user interaction or API call may affect access-control decisions.
OPAL runs in the background, supercharging policy agents and keeping them in sync with events in real time.

AWS Cedar + OPAL == 💪

Cedar is a very powerful policy language, which powers AWS’ AVP (Amazon Verified Permissions) - but what if you want to enjoy the power of Cedar on another cloud, locally, or on premise?
This is where Cedar-Agent and OPAL come in.

This video briefly explains OPAL and how it works with OPA, and a deeper dive into it at this OWASP DevSlop talk.

Who’s Using OPAL?

OPAL is being used as the core engine of Permit.io Authorization Service and serves in production:

• > 10,000 policy engines deployment
• > 100,000 policy changes and data synchronizations every day
• > 10,000,000 authorization checks every day

Besides Permit, OPAL is being used in Production in Tesla, Walmart, The NBA, Intel, Cisco, Live-Oak Bank, and thousands of other development teams and companies of all sizes.

Documentation

• 📃   Full documentation is available here

• 💡   Intro to OPAL

• 🚀   Getting Started:

  OPAL is available both as python packages with a built-in CLI as well as pre-built docker images ready-to-go.

  • Play with a live playground environment in docker-compose
  • Try the getting started guide for containers
  • Check out the Helm Chart for Kubernetes

• A video demo of OPAL is available here

• You can also check out this webinar and Q&A about OPAL on our YouTube channel
  
  

• 💪   TL;DR - This one command will download and run a working configuration of OPAL server and OPAL client on your machine:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/permitio/opal/master/docker/docker-compose-example.yml \
> docker-compose.yml && docker compose up

• 🧠   "How-To"s

  • How to get started with OPAL (Packages and CLI)

  • How to get started with OPAL (Container Images)

  • How to trigger Data Updates via OPAL

  • How to extend OPAL to fetch data from your sources with FetchProviders

  • How to configure OPAL (basic concepts)

  • How to Use OPAL with Cedar in a Multi-Language Project

• 🎨   Key concepts and design

• 🏗️   Architecture
  
  

📖 For further reading, check out our Blog

Community

We would love to chat with you about OPAL. Join our Slack community to chat about authorization, open-source, realtime communication, tech, or anything else!

You can raise questions and ask for features to be added to the road-map in our Github discussions, report issues in Github issues




If you like our project, please consider giving us a ⭐️

Contributing to OPAL

• Pull requests are welcome! (please make sure to include passing tests and docs)
• Prior to submitting a PR - open an issue on GitHub, or make sure your PR addresses an existing issue well.

There’s more!

• Check out OPToggles, which enables you to create user targeted feature flags/toggles based on Open Policy managed authorization rules!
• Check out Cedar-Agent, the easiest way to deploy & run AWS Cedar.