How to Successfully Migrate from OPA to Kyverno

There’s no turning back from the widespread migration to the cloud we have witnessed over the past decade. Companies are leveraging the flexible, extensible nature of container management solutions like Kubernetes to increase efficiency, scale rapidly, and maintain more agile cloud service delivery. Unfortunately, these benefits do come with a few drawbacks—mainly in reduced security and increasingly complex Kubernetes clusters.?

Policy management engines, also known as Policy-as-Code (PaC), have emerged as a promising solution to the many headaches of container management. The two front runners, in this case, are Open Policy Agent and Kyverno.?

OPA/Gatekeeper — This PaC solution is more of a veteran in the space, lauded for its ability to be applied generally across different container management systems. Their Kubernetes-specific version, Gatekeeper, allows enterprises that use Kubernetes clusters to apply policy validation and mutation functions. Unfortunately, this requires that DevOps teams learn the complex Rego language, a code specific to OPA that can drain time and resources.?

Kyverno —Developed by Nirmata and open-sourced by the CNCF, Kyverno is a Kubernetes-native PaC solution that has extended functionality compared to OPA. From resource generation to API object hookups, Kyverno allows enterprise DevOps teams to take advantage of the native language used by Kubernetes clusters to provide more fine-grained solutions. When it comes to managing policy in Kubernetes-dominant cloud environments, Kyverno represents the ideal option.

If you’re interested in learning how to migrate from OPA to Kyverno and reap the benefits of this simple PaC solution, check out the latest article from Nirmata!