OPA Slack Tune Up

Celebrating the growth of OPA community with a little cleanup.

Published in

Open Policy Agent

5 min readAug 19, 2021

The OPA community now has over 4,600 members in Slack! This is a tremendous milestone and we are so excited to have all of the new members join us. With this explosion of new members, the total number of Slack channels has crept up on us. The OPA team has noticed having so many channels has created confusion for our new and existing members on where to post about specific topics or themes. To make Slack easier to navigate we are rolling out a new set of channel names and descriptions. We hope this new structure will make Slack a bit easier for everyone. However, if you have a suggestion on how to make it better we would love to know.

Primary / Default Channels.

Any new members joining the OPA community will want to hang out here to start! Read about the latest announcements, introduce yourself in the community chit-chat and ask questions in the help channel.

#announcements

Previous channel name: #general

The general channel is now the announcements channel. General was our busiest channel by far! It is now our announcements channel so that big news like releases and community events can stick around longer. New channels have been created for chit-chat and general help questions. The announcements channel is still open for anyone to post, but now think about posting things you want the entire community to know.

#chit-chat

Previous channel name: #random

Everyone loves a good random channel and the OPA community is no different. Just because we changed the name you shouldn’t feel the need to change what you’re posting. Drop in your OPA memes and funny web links just like before. But now we also want to include community introductions and general chatter here as well.

#help

Previous channel names:

#rego
#openpolicyagent
#questions_and_answers
#feasibility-question

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to find help while learning about OPA. So we’ve combined the channels we noticed new members were looking for help into a single channel. We hope that this will make it easier for everyone to know where to go when they need help and where to go when they feel like helping others.

Integrations

For OPA users that have been around for a while you are probably well aware of the Conftest and Gatekeeper projects. These two OPA projects have gained a lot of traction and provide amazing contributions to the OPA community. If you have specific questions about the projects these channels are the best place to go. While the maintainers do hang around these channels, we love seeing community members showing off their OPA knowledge answering questions for each other.

#conftest

Conftest is a must have in your policy toolkit. Write tests against structured configuration files including JSON, YAML, XML, Dockerfile, HCL, and more.

#gatekeeper

Gatekeeper helps you safeguard your Kubernetes clusters by defining OPA-based admission control policies that are enforced via webhooks. Gatekeeper also helps you audit your Kubernetes clusters to detect policy violations.

Topics

Trimmed down from the myriad of channels that existed before, the OPA team has chosen 3 channels that contained the most buzz from the community. Terraform, Envoy and WebAssembly are the 3 topics we noticed everyone likes to chat about. We hope that this buzz continues to grow. Also be on the lookout for programs in the future to be recognized as OPA experts in these areas.

#terraform

Terraform lets you describe the infrastructure you want and automatically creates, deletes, and modifies your existing infrastructure to match. OPA makes it possible to write policies that test the changes Terraform is about to make before it makes them.

#envoy

OPA-Envoy plugin extends OPA with a gRPC server that implements the Envoy External Authorization API. You can use this version of OPA to enforce fine-grained, context-aware access control policies with Envoy without modifying your microservices.

#wasm

OPA is able to compile Rego policies into executable Wasm modules that can be evaluated with different inputs and external data. This is not running the OPA server in Wasm, nor is this just cross-compiled Golang code. The compiled Wasm module is a planned evaluation path for the source policy and query.

Archived Channels

#intros
#bosun
#feedback
#registry
#intellij-extension
#gsoc19

You may notice some of the lesser used channels have been archived, we picked these channels based on a number of factors such as frequency of posts and average rate of responses. Ultimately we feel consolidating these conversations into the primary channel #chit-chat will increase participation and response rates.

Bot Channels

#bot-github
#bot-rss

These are not the bots you’re looking for…or maybe they are! Going forward any channels with the `bot-` prefix will be used for channels that include Slack bots or automated tools. Currently, the OPA team uses these channels to keep up to date with external sources like Stack Overflow, Reddit, and GitHub.

Wrapping Up

Whether you’re an OPA power user or looking to write your first Rego policy, we want the OPA Slack community to be your home for all things policy related. The OPA team realizes that sometimes new ideas need their own space to flourish. If you’re interested in creating a new channel, reach out to @peteroneilljr or @tsandall on Slack and join us in our mission to solve policy enforcement across the stack. In addition to these Slack updates, you should also be on the look out for our new GitHub Discussions forum that will officially launch in the next couple of weeks. For a sneak peak check out the link at the bottom of this article!