The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced the graduation of Open Policy Agent (OPA). OPA is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that enables unified, context-aware policy enforcement across the entire stack.

The project was accepted into the CNCF sandbox in April 2018 and one year later was promoted to incubation.

More than 90 individuals from approximately 30 organizations contribute to OPA, and maintainers come from four organizations, including Google, Microsoft, VMware, and Styra.

The project has been adopted widely in production by organizations like Goldman Sachs, Netflix, Pinterest, T-Mobile, and many others.

According to a recent OPA user survey of more than 150 organizations, 91% indicated they use OPA in some stage of OPA adoption from QA to production. More than half indicated they use OPA for at least two use cases.

The most common use cases for OPA are configuration authorization (such as Kubernetes admission control) and API authorization. The project has successfully integrated with several CNCF projects, including Kubernetes, Envoy, CoreDNS, Helm, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and more. It also integrates with Gatekeeper to provide a Kubernetes-native experience for admission policy enforcement and auditing.