Open Policy Agent (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive - Philip Conrad, Tyler Schade, Rita Zhang & Jaydip Gabani

Don't miss out! Join us at our next Flagship Conference: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (23-26 March, 2026). Connect with our current graduated, incubating, and sandbox projects as the community gathers to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Learn more at https://kubecon.io Open Policy Agent (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive - Philip Conrad, Apple; Tyler Schade, GEICO Tech; Rita Zhang & Jaydip Gabani, Microsoft Come to this session to learn about the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project. OPA is a general-purpose policy engine that solves a number of policy-related use cases for authorization, Kubernetes, service mesh, CI/CD, infrastructure permissions, and more. This session will begin with OPA maintainers welcoming newcomers by introducing the project and covering core concepts. Current users will then receive an overview of recent changes, highlighting exciting new features and improvements across OPA and its broader ecosystem. OPA Envoy maintainer Tyler Schade will also share some details about recent changes to the OPA Envoy project, including enhancements to Envoy integration and improved support for SPIFFE identities. A short Gatekeeper update will cover VAP integration (now beta & default), a new audit violations disk export driver, Rego v1 syntax support and more. If you are interested in policy as code and security as it relates to cloud native technology, this session is for you. OPA maintainers will also be available for questions after the session.