The OPA Monthly Newsletter

January Edition

Peter O'Neill

Published in

Open Policy Agent

5 min readJan 31, 2022

Intro

After an extended holiday break, the OPA newsletter is back in 2022 with our first edition! This edition brings new versions of OPA and Conftest, as well as some amazing community contributions and tools.

Community Updates

The latest news in the OPA community.

Call for maintainers

The OPA project is a great way to get involved in open source and cloud native technology. We have 2 sub-projects that are a great place to get started!

Do you like writing Javascript, are you interested in WebAssembly? Check out the: NPM Module
Like to hack on IDE integrations? Take a look at the: Intellij Plugin

On the fence? Not sure if being an OPA maintainer is right for you? Drop us a note in the #development channel in Slack.

Public Calendar

There is now a public calendar for OPA events. Want to get something added to the calendar, just let us know.

Public Calendar Link

Office Hours

Every Thursday hang out with someone from the OPA team, ask some questions, and learn some OPA tips.

Invite Link

GitHub Discussions

The GitHub Discussions repository has been renamed from Feedback to Community. This is still the place to go to ask questions and to receive support from the community. But now we want to expand it to include even more helpful community tools.

Community Discussions

OPA Mailing List

Now you can receive the latest OPA news right to your inbox! Going forward we will be using a standard email list to send out the monthly newsletter as well as other OPA tips and tricks. Sign up today so you don’t miss out!

Join our mailing list! http://eepurl.com/hSFrEP

Community Shoutouts

We have two amazing community contributions this month.

The first up is an OPA Guide Book, originally written in Korean and translated to English. The English version is an open source project managed by the author Sangkeon Lee!

OPA Guide Book: https://sangkeon.github.io/opaguide/

This next one comes from the Japanese OPA community, an OPA Advent Calendar. We love to see contributions from our communities around the world! Created and managed by Masayoshi Mizutani!

OPA Advent Calendar: https://adventar.org/calendars/6601

Slack Updates

We’ve welcomed over 350 new Slack members since the last newsletter, now there are over 5400 members to chat with! It’s awesome to see everyone showing up being a part of the OPA community.

Some small changes, we’ve added bookmarks to each of the channels to help members quickly find relevant resources. You can see these right under the channel names.

For the new members of the community here is a quick breakdown of the most common channels.

#announcements — OPA team shares information about the project
#chit-chat — For community introductions and general communication
#help — Help getting started with the OPA project
#development — To talk about code contributions
#opa-gatekeeper — For Gatekeeper questions
#opa-conftest — For Conftest questions

Hint: for technical help check out GitHub Discussions

GitHub Shoutouts

There were so many amazing community contributions this month, a big shout out to all of these members for their contributions!

Rien Valkenaers gave a huge contribution with OpenTelemetry support
Jordan Shaw Four new functions for working with HMAC
Kristian Svalland and Omolola Olamide added builtins for reversing arrays and strings
Mira Yadav Updated http.send built-in to count inter-query cache hits
Jasper Van der Jeugt fixed an issue with opa fmt
Branden Horiuchi exposed the HTTP router to the plugin manager
Gasc Florian fixed an unintended switch between long/regular polling
Christian Schuetz and Oren Zohar add opa.runtime() to the SDK
Alan Ma added a feedback button to all of the docs
Johannes Larsson and Rory McCune updated the CI builds
Shuhei Kitagawa upgraded golangci-lint to v1.43.0

Twitter Highlights

While we can’t show all of the tweets we receive every month, we appreciate the love from the OPA community on Twitter ❤️ 🐦! Here are a few of the highlights.

Direct links to posts

Ecosystem Updates

Another month means new releases for OPA and the OPA subprojects!

OPA Release v.0.36.0

Added OpenTelemetry support. #1469
New command ‘opa exec’ for one-off policy evaluation #3525
New functions crypto.hmac.md5, crypto.hmac.sha1, crypto.hmac.sha256, and crypto.hmac.sha512 #1740
New capability ‘allow_net’ added to restrict network connections #3665
Added AWS credential provider #2786
New Flag ‘ — tls-cert-refresh-period’ for opa server #2500
Added v1/status endpoint#4089

Conftest Release v0.30.0

Always use ORAS context when interacting with a registry
Update containerd to v1.5.9

Conftest Release v.0.29.0

Add check flag to fmt command
Support for terragrunt default config files
feat: add a quiet flag to verify command

Kube-mgmt Release v3.2.0

Make cert-manager certs duration configurable
Enable setting admissioncontroller annotations

Tools from the Community

Every month we discover new tools that were created by the OPA community. Try these out in your project!

Terraform Plugin: https://github.com/echoboomer/terraform-opa-buildkite-plugin
Kubernetes sidecar: https://github.com/hooksie1/cmsnr
Gatekeeper Intro: https://github.com/romerobu/intro-gatekeeper
APISIX integration: https://apisix.apache.org/blog/2021/12/24/open-policy-agent/
Github Action https://github.com/infracost/setup-opa
Kubernetes Helper https://github.com/anderseknert/kube-review

Let us know how we did.

Thanks for reading the January edition of the OPA Newsletter! This is an ongoing process and we are always looking to improve it. Let us know what we can do better, or send us content for the next newsletter: opa_newsletter@styra.com.

If you’re new to OPA or to the community check out these resources.

Chat with the community on Slack
Start a thread on GitHub Discussions
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