---
title: "Open Policy Agent graduates in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation"
authors: ["tsandall", "timhinrichs"]
date: 2021-02-04
slug: open-policy-agent-graduates-in-the-cloud-native-computing-foundation-f00145202a99
---

![OPA graduates in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation banner](/img/blog/open-policy-agent-graduates-in-the-cloud-native-computing-foundation-f00145202a99/banner.webp)

We're excited to announce that Open Policy Agent (OPA) is now a graduated project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)! Graduation reflects the maturity of the project in terms of adoption, diversity of contributions, community and overall quality.

The growth over the last year has been phenomenal. The number of users on slack.openpolicyagent.org has grown by 3x (to over 3,600 users) and the number of Docker image downloads surpassed 39M (a 1000% increase!) We attribute much of this growth to the need for a robust policy-as-code solution in the cloud native ecosystem.

In the last year, the project shipped a number of powerful new features such as signed bundles, improved data fetching capabilities, parser and evaluator optimizations, as well as expanded support for WebAssembly-based execution environments. [OPA Gatekeeper](https://github.com/open-policy-agent/gatekeeper) reached GA and added several features including multi-pod scalability, semantic logging, fine-grained metrics, dry-run support, and more. The popular [Conftest](https://github.com/open-policy-agent/conftest) tool (which helps you write tests against structured configuration files) became an official OPA subproject. Finally, support for IntelliJ users landed with the [OPA IDEA](https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa-idea-plugin) plugin.

Graduation is a huge milestone for the project, and we wanted to take a moment to thank everyone involved in making OPA a successful, graduated project:

- First, we'd like to thank the CNCF for their partnership and for all their support over the years. We would particularly like to thank Chris Aniszczyk, Amye Scavarda Perrin, Ihor Dvoretskyi for the excellent support they provided along the way.
- We'd also like to thank all of the maintainers and core contributors to the OPA project: Ash Narkar, Boran Seref, Craig Tabita, Gareth Rushgrove, John Reese, Lennard Eijsackers, Max Smythe, Oren Shomron, Patrick East, Rita Zhang, Sertaç Özercan, and Stephan Renatus.
- Lastly, we'd like to send a HUGE thank you to the entire OPA community. All new OPA features and partnerships were driven by your feedback and contributions. We also want to recognize certain people whose feedback, contribution, and support has been invaluable: Anders Eknert, Jasper Van der Jeugt, Joe Searcy, and Vincent Gramer.

Going forward we'll continue to focus on improving all aspects of OPA while solving real problems around policy and authorization in the cloud native ecosystem. We look forward to continuing to work with the amazing OPA community that started nearly five years ago. But, for today, let's all celebrate (socially distanced, of course) together on this great milestone!
