Styra Extends Security and Compliance for Kubernetes

Styra, Inc., the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leaders in cloud-native authorization, today announced new enhancements to their Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), including support for Kubernetes mutating webhooks and new compliance pack for pod security policies. Styra DAS, the company’s first commercial product, is a management plane that enables Developers and DevOps teams to operationalize OPA authorization policies. These new enhancements extend the Styra DAS security and compliance solution for Kubernetes, enabling DevOps to author, distribute, monitor, audit and perform impact analysis for OPA policy-as-code guardrails, with a consistent framework.

As enterprises move containerized/cloud-native applications into production, they must ensure that workloads are secure and compliant with relevant regulations before they reach runtime. This can require manual reviews and operational overhead, both of which can lead to operational errors, risk and interruptions that slow developer productivity. Styra mitigates these risks with guardrails that integrate with Kubernetes to allow only what’s right, minimizing human error and preventing non-compliant workloads from ever reaching production.

“Our team is always trying to get the most out of automation, so that we can focus on quickly delivering apps and updates to our customers,” says Marlene Veum, Director, Security Engineering at Frontdoor, Inc. “That said, compliance is a big wrapper around everything we do, and we can’t cut corners when it comes to internal and external regulations. By supporting Kubernetes Pod Security Policies and mutating webhooks, Styra allows us to easily implement best practices across our clusters without having to research and build them from the ground up, and eliminates a lot of manual overhead that can slow our release cycles—freeing our team up to focus on delivering the best apps to our customers.”

Adding support for Kubernetes mutating webhooks enables Styra policies to go beyond “allow or deny,” to automatically append, update or add relevant parameters to ensure workloads are compliant before they reach production. Support for these Admission Controllers means Styra DAS can automatically remediate problems that would otherwise result in blocked workloads and manual review. The new Pod security policies (PSP) pack extends the existing best practices and PCI DSS 3.2 policy packs, all of which eliminate the need to research, identify and implement baseline guardrails/policies for Kubernetes. With best-practice guardrails in place from the start, human error and missteps that delay projects, slow delivery and introduce risk are eliminated.

“As more organizations embrace the cloud, they also need to adopt a cloud-native authorization policy in order to mitigate security and compliance risk. Our mission now is the same as it has been since we launched OPA — to provide organizations with the guardrails necessary to implement a consistent policy framework across the entire app development environment,” said Tim Hinrichs, co-founder and chief technology officer of Styra. “These new enhancements to Styra DAS help our customers eliminate manual overhead, minimize risk and accelerate development timelines.”

Mutating Webhooks: Taking full advantage of Kubernetes Admission Control APIs, support for Mutating Webhooks means that Styra DAS can automate compliance and minimize the need for human intervention. This streamlines delivery pipelines and lessens interrupts that can distract and slow DevOps teams. The ability to automatically modify non-compliant workloads before deployment means, for example, that workloads missing critical configuration like resource requirements, privilege controls, labels or network parameters will have those details added programmatically, based on specified policy.  

Mutating webhooks can also help ensure correct, consistent deployment. For example, Styra DAS can enforce policy that automatically adds an appropriate sidecar, such as a proxy, to each relevant workload to ensure service mesh or networking rules always have the necessary components to keep clusters running correctly.

Pod Security Policies Packs: PSPs, which are native to Kubernetes, enable developers to control access to the host operating system. Acting as built-in baseline guardrails across clusters, PSPs allow developers to enforce run-time permissions for a container and permit actions on the kernel. While PSPs are valuable to managing security risk, the time and expertise needed to research, identify and manually implement them on each Kubernetes cluster can result in costly delays due to misconfigurations. 

With Styra support for PSPs, developers can build, save and distribute PSP policy in discrete “packs” to accelerate Kubernetes adoption, decrease time spent writing and configuring policies from scratch and reduce human error. Styra eases the process of authoring configurations and distribution across clusters, while also providing DevOps teams impact analysis, monitoring and auditing of results. 

Automatic webhook mutating and PSP packs are available now to all Styra customers. Learn more about Styra here. 

Styra enables enterprises to define, enforce and monitor policy across their Kubernetes environments. With a combination of open source (Open Policy Agent) and commercial solutions (Declarative Authorization Service), Styra provides security, operations and compliance guardrails to protect applications, as well as the infrastructure they run on. Styra policy-as-code solutions lets developers, DevOps and security teams mitigate risks, reduce human error and accelerate application development. Learn more at styra.com.