As the creator of Open Policy Agent (OPA), Styra has played an extraordinary role in shaping the Policy as Code (PaC) movement and advancing cloud-native security and governance. This week, the founders and core team behind Styra announced that they are joining Apple.

I first met the Styra team at KubeCon 2017 in Austin, when Brian Grant saw an early demo of what we were building, and suggested that I talk to them. Although we have significantly different approaches to PaC, one of my favorite moments at each KubeCon since has been catching up with folks from Styra and exchanging notes on the space.

We here at Nirmata, want to take a moment to recognize and thank the entire Styra team – their founders Teemu, Tim, Torin, along with Anders, Charlie and many others – for their pioneering work. Without their vision and drive, there would be no PaC ecosystem as we know it today. 

At Nirmata, we know that Kyverno’s journey, and our own, would not have been possible without the foundation laid by the OPA community. The early adoption of OPA proved the need for declarative policies and automated governance. It set the standard for how organizations think about declarative policies across cloud and infrastructure environments and it will continue to play an important role in the CNCF landscape.

We are also encouraged that the Styra team has found a great home at Apple. With such a strong technology leader supporting them, the OPA community can look forward to ongoing innovation, stability, and new opportunities for growth. We are excited to see what comes next in the OPA roadmap and how the project continues to evolve as a critical part of the cloud native landscape.

Nirmata will continue to remain deeply committed to open source, to CNCF, and to the broader PaC community. As the creators and core maintainers of Kyverno, we share in the mission that OPA helped spark: making policy-driven governance accessible, reliable, and scalable for enterprises around the world.

This is a moment to honor OPA’s legacy, celebrate Styra’s contributions, and look forward to a vibrant future for the entire Policy as Code ecosystem.