Governance Briefing — Open Policy Agent Graduates CNCF
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation promoted Open Policy Agent to graduated status, signaling production readiness for unified policy-as-code enforcement across Kubernetes, microservices, and CI/CD pipelines.
Executive briefing: On , the Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced Open Policy Agent (OPA) as a graduated project following widespread adoption for Kubernetes admission control, microservice authorization, and infrastructure guardrails.
Key updates
- Enterprise adoption milestone. Graduation reflects production use at Netflix, Chef, and Capital One, providing assurance for regulated workloads.
- Rego policy ecosystem. Shared policy libraries and tooling (Conftest, Gatekeeper) matured to support GitOps and CI validation.
- Extensibility. Pluggable decision logging, bundles, and WASM targets let teams embed policy enforcement across services and CLIs.
Implementation guidance
- Integrate OPA Gatekeeper or Kyverno alternatives into Kubernetes admission pipelines to enforce configuration baselines.
- Adopt Rego unit testing and CI checks to prevent policy regressions before deployment.
- Centralize policy distribution using OPA bundles with signing and version control.
- Instrument decision logs for audit evidence supporting compliance attestations.