OPAL on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

OPAL, the Open Policy Administration Layer, solves the hardest part of running Open Policy Agent at scale: keeping policy and data current everywhere, all the time. You keep your authorization policy in a git repository as the single source of truth. OPAL server watches that repository, and the moment a change is committed it publishes the update to every subscribed OPAL client, which writes it straight into its local Open Policy Agent. Applications ask Open Policy Agent for an authorization decision and always get an answer based on the current rules, with no redeploy, no service restart and no polling loop of your own to build and maintain.

OPAL on its own is infrastructure rather than a finished system, so this image ships a complete, coherent single node appliance: OPAL server, OPAL client and Open Policy Agent, installed, wired together and working from the first boot. A working example policy repository is seeded on the machine so the appliance answers real authorization decisions immediately, and repointing it at your own repository is a single documented configuration change.

Secure by default

Open Policy Agent's API is unauthenticated by default and its Data API can overwrite policy, which makes an exposed agent a complete authorization bypass. This image is built around that fact. Open Policy Agent is bound to the loopback interface and is never reachable from outside the machine, and the OPAL server and client control channels are loopback only as well, authenticated with a per instance master token and a JSON Web Token signed by a per instance 4096 bit key. The only externally reachable service is an nginx reverse proxy on port 443 which requires HTTP basic authentication over TLS and exposes a deliberately narrow slice of Open Policy Agent: decision queries only. Requests that would modify policy or data are rejected before they ever reach the agent, so even a caller holding the credential can ask questions but cannot rewrite the rules.

There is no shared or default credential anywhere. The upstream project ships a well known development placeholder for its client and channel tokens; this image overrides both. On each virtual machine's first boot a fresh master token, signing keypair, client token, TLS certificate and basic authentication password are generated and written to a root only file, so no two deployments are ever the same and nothing usable is baked into the image.

Ready on first boot

• OPAL server, OPAL client and Open Policy Agent start in a strict, deadlock free order under systemd, with the client's token minted from the running server before the client starts.
• A working example policy repository is seeded on the machine, so authorization decisions can be queried within moments of launch.
• A built in self test proves the whole round trip end to end: it loads a known policy, asserts the expected allow and deny decisions, commits a policy change and asserts the decision genuinely changes once distributed, then rolls it back.
• OPAL is installed into an isolated Python virtual environment, and the exact resolved dependency set is recorded inside the image for auditing.
• No outbound telemetry: Open Policy Agent runs with telemetry disabled and OPAL's optional application performance monitoring is switched off.

Upstream project status

OPAL is a sound and widely used open source project, and we would rather be straightforward about its pace. The repository is actively maintained and not archived, and recent changes are genuine engineering work rather than dependency bumps, but the commit cadence through 2026 has been modest and the project has not yet reached a 1.0 release. Plan on the basis that upstream fixes arrive steadily rather than rapidly.

Why cloudimg

cloudimg delivers the whole appliance assembled, hardened and proven, rather than a bare component you must wire together yourself. The image is fully patched on a hardened Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base, ships no shared credentials, and passes an automated verification gate that proves the policy distribution round trip actually works before the image is ever released. Backed by 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA and a step by step deployment guide.

Licensing

OPAL is open source software distributed under the Apache License 2.0, and Open Policy Agent is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. Both are free. The full resolved dependency set was verified at the artifact level to contain no source available or non commercial components. The cloudimg charge covers packaging, hardening, security patching, image maintenance and 24/7 support.