Open Policy Agent (OPA) is a general-purpose policy engine used to define and enforce policy across different systems. In Kubernetes, OPA is commonly integrated through admission control (often via Gatekeeper or custom admission webhooks) tovalidate and/or mutate requestsbefore they are persisted in the cluster. This makesBcorrect: Kubernetes can use OPA to validate API requests and apply policy decisions.

Kubernetes’ admission chain is where policy enforcement naturally fits. When a user or controller submits a request (for example, to create a Pod), the API server can call external admission webhooks. Those webhooks can evaluate the request against policy—such as “no privileged containers,” “images must come from approved registries,” “labels must include cost-center,” or “Ingress must enforce TLS.” OPA’s policy language (Rego) allows expressing these rules in a declarative form, and the decision (“allow/deny” and sometimes patches) is returned to the API server. This enforces governance consistently and centrally.

Option A is incorrect because OPA policies are written inRego, not Python. Option C is incorrect because policies can be tested locally and in CI pipelines before deployment; in fact, testability is a key advantage. Option D is incorrect because OPA is designed to beplatform-agnostic—it can be used with APIs, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, service meshes, and infrastructure tools, not only Kubernetes.

From a Kubernetes fundamentals view, OPA complements RBAC: RBAC answers “who can do what to which resources,” while OPA-style admission policies answer “even if youcancreate this resource, does it meet our organizational rules?” Together they help implement defense in depth: authentication + authorization + policy admission + runtime security controls. That is why OPA is widely used to enforce security and compliance requirements in Kubernetes environments.

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