Styra and Kong partner to secure modern cloud-native applications

Styra, founders of the Open Policy Agent (OPA), have announced a new partnership with Kong.

The two organisations say they're aligned in a shared vision to secure modern cloud-native applications with dynamic, policy-enabled traffic control for microservices. The Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) is now integrated with Kong Mesh, an enterprise-grade service mesh built on Kong's open source Kuma, enabling security and operations teams to meet internal and external regulations.

According to Styra, many organisations are moving from monolithic applications to microservices-based applications to accelerate innovation. But the company says digital transformation journeys come with challenges, and the transition to microservices is no different. It says teams need to ensure services are connected reliably with minimal latency while preventing unauthorised access and minimising the risk of a data breach.

Organisations can leverage OPA and Kong Mesh as open source options to manage traffic flow between services, but these solutions require teams to design and deploy integrations themselves and lack a framework for management, monitoring or collaboration.

Styra and Kong now offer a turnkey solution for deploying OPA and Kuma that delivers the service proxies and policy-as-code controls needed to establish or deny traffic to, from or between individual microservices and apps. With the new integration of Styra DAS and Kong Mesh, individuals have the collaboration tools and visibility required to manage policy-enabled traffic control at scale.

Styra DAS and Kong Mesh enable IT, security, and governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) teams to:

• Reduce operational overhead with automated policy-as-code based control of multiple service meshes.
• Govern, monitor and audit traffic flow and policy decisions for real-time verification of performance and risk.
• Increase application reliability with policy-based traffic management.
• Manage microservice policy lifecycle from initial authoring through to deployment and monitoring. 
• Rapidly implement open source solutions OPA and Kuma at a global scale.

"When teams embrace a microservice architecture, they need to manage what those services can do," says Styra co-founder and CTO, Tim Hinrichs.

"Styra and Kong both believe microservices are the future of application development and that controlling those services is critical to both performance and security.

"This partnership makes perfect sense since Kong's API gateway and service mesh solutions provide the modern network control points for APIs and microservices, and Styra solutions provide the authorisation policy to control how and when those APIs are called."

Kong co-founder and CTO, Marco Palladino, says they aim to ensure that a company's connectivity across APIs, hybrid and multi-cloud environments is reliable and runs seamlessly.

"As the use of cloud-native applications increases, we are excited to work with Styra to advance policy scalability across our solutions, ensure traffic flow is governed by policy, and meet the needs of developers and security teams alike."