§49 · Lane 8 — Agent Infrastructure Standards & Toolchain
Open Policy Agent / Rego
CNCF / OPA community (2026) · OPA v1.17.0
Bibliographic data
- Title
- Open Policy Agent (OPA) and the Rego policy language (v1.17.0, May 2026)
- Authors / Issuing body
- Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) — Graduated project (originated by Styra)
- Venue / Publisher
- CNCF / OPA community
- Year
- 2026
- Designation
- policy-engine
- Licence
- Apache-2.0 — refer to publisher for full licence terms.
- Canonical link
- https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/
How to cite
CNCF / OPA community (2026). Open Policy Agent (OPA) and the Rego policy language (v1.17.0, May 2026). CNCF / OPA community. https://www.openpolicyagent.org/docs/latest/.
General-purpose policy engine that decouples policy decision-making from application logic, using the Rego declarative language for policy-as-code across the stack.
Why it matters for NETEVO
OPA is the most-adopted general-purpose policy engine in the cloud-native stack. The Agent Infrastructure Whitepaper Dimension 2 (policy-as-code) cites OPA explicitly alongside AWS Cedar as the runtime engine that consumes policy and returns ALLOW / DENY / OBLIGATE decisions per agent action. NETEVO clients running Kubernetes, microservices, or any modern cloud architecture have an OPA decision point somewhere in the stack already.
OPA pairs with Cedar and Catala as the policy-language triad the Law-to-Code Methodology can target. Where Cedar emphasises formal analysability and Catala emphasises law-as-DSL fidelity, OPA / Rego emphasises operational ubiquity and cloud-native integration. NETEVO surfaces that discuss policy-language selection should cite the triad together — the choice is positional, and the Methodology is engine-agnostic.
OPA has no peer-reviewed paper anchor and is therefore harder than usual to cite in academic-style bibliographies, but the project documentation at the canonical URL is a stable citation surface. NETEVO tracks OPA via its GitHub releases.
Where NETEVO applies this
- Agent Infrastructure Whitepaper — load-bearing — Dimension 2 (policy-as-code); pair with Cedar