Open Policy Agent (OPA) - CI/CD Glossary Definition

OPA is a policy engine that evaluates Rego rules over JSON to make consistent authorization and compliance decisions.

Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a general-purpose policy engine that evaluates rules written in the Rego language against JSON input to return allow/deny or other structured decisions.

OPA decouples policy from application code, so the same rules can guard APIs, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.

In CI/CD

Tools like conftest embed OPA to evaluate Terraform plans, Kubernetes manifests, or Dockerfiles as a pipeline gate, failing the build on a deny decision.

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