Privately-held Styra, the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and provides of cloud-native authorization, reported over 300 percent growth year-over-year in 2020. The company’s employee headcount grew by 90% during the year.
The company said the rapid adoption of its Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), the company’s turnkey enterprise security solution built on the recently graduated open-source project OPA, can be attributed to accelerating global demand for an authorization solution that meets the flexibility and scale requirements of Kubernetes and cloud-native environments—due in no small part to a newly remote workforce and need for highly available cloud-based applications and services.
In 2020, OPA was awarded graduated status from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) after meeting the foundation’s criteria for community growth and project adoption. OPA downloads increased from 6 million to over 35 million in 2020.
“OPA adoption across all use cases over the last year has been phenomenal,” said Torin Sandall, vice president of open source at Styra. “We’ve seen the community grow in every measurable way. Slack and openpolicyagent.org membership and participation has more than doubled, the number of public repositories on GitHub containing .rego files has also doubled and the number of Docker image downloads has gone from 6M to over 39M. We attribute much of this growth to the efforts of the community and to the need for a robust authorization policy-as-code solution in the cloud native ecosystem.”
Open Policy Agent: Building a standard for cloud-native authorization
Here is a quick introduction to Open Policy Agent (OPA), which is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation incubating project, and which provides an open source, general-purpose policy engine for cloud infrastructure.
The cloud-native stack is becoming so complex and distributed that a common, application autorization mechanism is necessary.
In this video, Bill Mann, CEO of Styra, talks about how OPA is gaining momentum as the de facto approach for establishing authorization policies across cloud native environments. Styra pioneered OPA. Its founding team of Tim Hinrichs and Teemu Koponen previously played key roles in the development of software-defined networking and network virtualization at Nicira.
