OpenSSF Community Day India 2025

Choosing a policy engine today can be overwhelming. Tools like OPA, Kyverno-JSON, and Kubewarden offer different languages, semantics, and integrations—but each comes with trade-offs in expressiveness, performance, and developer experience.

Policy engines are expanding beyond Kubernetes admission control to validate arbitrary JSON payloads like Terraform plans, Dockerfiles, and cloud configs. But not all tools make it easy to write, test, or integrate policies early in the dev cycle, before reaching the Kubernetes API. Some lack testing, others struggle with composition or debugging.

This talk’ll compare these policy engines across language design, evaluation semantics, and developer tooling. We’ll explore their strengths, gaps, and emerging trends like WASM and shift-left validation.

Join us for the talk, and leave equipped to confidently choose the right policy engine, a clear view of the pitfalls to avoid before they hit production, and a clear idea of where the ecosystem is heading.