Styra Load – Tim Hinrichs, Styra

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstruck TV. I'm really happy to have my buddy.

Tim Hendricks from styra back with us. Tim is a co-founder CTO and of course styra, the people who are behind the original Opa, no, not the Greek restaurant open source policy agent and Tim. Welcome to techstroke TV.

It's great to have you Alan it's good to see you again. Thanks so much for having me back. I absolutely we would just talking hopefully we'll see you out in Amsterdam for kubecon cloudnativecon.

And that's I think the week of April. I want to say 15 something like that. I think that's when I get to Amsterdam, but it's probably the 28 17 18 19 like that.

But Tim we got time to talk about kubecon. We wanted to talk about some news coming out of thyra before we do though. Look I I think our audience maybe it's heard of style.

I'd like a good chunk of them know open Spira, but for those who aren't sure don't why don't we start off there a little background? Yeah, great. Yeah, so remember styra is a company that's really trying to deliver policies code to the Enterprise.

Right? So I always think of policies code AS is that idea where every organization has all kinds of policies written in wikis and PDFs and what they want to do. It usually is a tell all their employees go read those policies and then understand them and then go ahead and Obey them, you know do the right things that policy say you you have to do policies code sort of takes out a step further advice to automate that process.

So it says take all those policies out of the wikis and PDFs and put them into basically software something like Opa so that then Opa can automatically in force those those rules those regulations where you want to call them. And so that's kind of what we're trying to do trying to bring that kind of idea to the Enterprise and there are a couple of places that We really popular. I can application.

So let's say you're a developer trying to build a new app for a bank or a mom and pop flower shop. It doesn't really matter. You probably need to implement some policies code to enforce the authorization policies for that app.

So what you know, can I withdraw money from my wife's account or can I not right? It's an authorization policy. You can Implement that as as policies code.

So that's the kind of thing that we do, you know starter tries to take policies code and make it a very exciting sort of technology that can be deployed at the Enterprise level. Absolutely, and just to give our audience a sense of scale. You know open policy agent, which I should mention is.

Is managed by this cncf right and has all and it it's a graduated. Yeah, congratulated project from CNC. I mean Millions literally millions and millions of downloads.

And users and so forth. So this is I mean there's a whole little not little there's a whole grade echo system built around right and it's become the Cornerstone for many several businesses right in addition to styra, but You know, certainly you guys pioneered it and and kind of help run it, you know would understand. Yeah, let's let's talk, you know.

like many open source projects Tim as the scale of usage increases as the the mission grows the original open source project Leaves a little help needs a little boost needs a little pick me up and and these additional kinds of you know, functionalities is really what a company like styra right? Thanks their hats on it. A lot of ways.

You guys have a new one that you recently announced and I know I steal the Thunder you tell our audience if you will Tim. For sure. Yeah.

So this this latest offering that we have we call it styrofload. Maybe you'll see why in a minute but the idea is that it is an Enterprise distribution of opa itself, but it's tailored for solving really data heavy or data intensive workload. So, you know, if open needs like lots of data in order to make a policy decision.

That's what we call a data heavy workload and we've been you know solving these data heavy workloads for for years because we run Opa in our SAS offerings and so we just realize that as we see more more people need to solve these data heavy policy problems that what we could do is take those algorithms that we develop for SASS and sort of pull them out of the fast and sort of make them available package them into you know, a standard looking Opa drop and replacement for Opa and then you know, everybody could leverage all the benefits that we you know, sort of work hard to put in place over the years to to solve those data heavy policy workloads. Absolutely, and so it is it is about load and scale. right I think loaded scale is something everyone understands Tim, but let's let's peel that onion back three layers.

What exactly and loaded scale like where where does? You know, where do you hit the wall and say okay. This is when I really need to go to something like styra load.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. Like you know what I kind of think about.

Is there a couple of things that we see people struggle with all the time around styload. So one of which is you're just trying to load let's say gigabyte of data, you know, if you're if you're loading a gigabyte of data into Opa and then using that data on every request to make decisions, that's the kind of place where you'll were you'll start wanting to use something like styload, or maybe what you're seeing is you've loaded Oppo with lots of data and now you're putting it under a very heavy workload. And so you want to sort of minimize the latency on those policy decisions to the extent you can I'm not that's another good good chance, that's another good opportunity to use to use load and then you've got the other kinds of challenges like, okay.

Well, let's say you can load lots of data into start load. That's great. But what we also try to do is make it very easy to sort of pull that data in so, you know integrating natively with tafa and other sort of data sources along the way and then The third kind of place that were maybe the fourth kind of place that we see people want something like styra load is where they're trying to reduce risk, right?

So they're running running this thing in production. And what what they know, is it every time you update a policy. There's a risk that you've made a mistake in some way that you just you know just didn't quite catch.

And so the other thing you can do is styload is sort of load a draft policy in place and kind of run Shadow traffic across it and kind of understand what impact that policy will have before you promote it all the way into production. So all of those things are things that we've seen and and solve for with our other staff products and we just sort of took some of those algorithms out and we're bundling them into you know package that looks like Opus the people that have that same functionality running down in there in their data point. excellent so yeah, I got to be the voice of the customer here a little bit.

So let's see. I'm already using like styra run is your basic it's not basic but it's you know, it's what you guys have been offering right? You have Styler run and there's another was inspired Dash started ass.

Yeah. Yep. Let's say I'm already using that.

Mm-hmm. Where do I say man? I good, but I really need to go to load or You know that that like what's the path there?

Yeah, good question. Yeah. So if you're using styrod as the idea is that Dazz or if you remember is sort of a management plane.

It's a control plane. It's that single pane of glass for managing and controlling all the different opas that are running throughout your ecosystem. And so, you know sometimes what what people find is that what they really would love to do is to have like data streaming directly into those into those open something that you know, you have to build stuff around Opa to make happen, but that would be a good opportunity to go ahead and and replace that Opa with that style reload.

Even while you're using dad. So those two things are complementary, you know, the the styloid just like Opa those are things that run through the data playing they're the things that are making the authorization decisions but started as the role is really one where it's helping you write policies and test them and deploy them down to the opos or the loads, but they're very complementary technology. So they they go hand in hand with one another that's actually so, you know It's not like you're outgrowing one to the other they they all work along in there.

Start reload. Is it available now Tamara? Is this something coming out soon or what's the story?

Yeah, it's available now. Yeah, and we're trying to make it super easy for folks to to go to the website. You just gotta you just got a ask for an activation key and then you can download it and then you just provide the key and it'll it'll work pretty much the way open it is you can go ahead and you're using oppa you've got a you know, some policies and some data that you're trying to load go ahead and hold down styra load add it add the activation key and and you should be able to just go ahead and run it using the same policies and data you had for opa.

excellent You know one of the things I remember early on in devops. Being at a like a Jenkins days or something and the folks at Cloud beasts had really kind of mapped out. once the time to move off of like Jenkins to a commercial Can you give me three things or not me, but our audience three things Tim that they should be if they're using Opa whether they're using just pure open source over.

Or or cyber run what like three kind of Telltale? symptoms are they seeing that really would help say? Hey, man, I should give low to try.

Yep, I'd say one of them is you're loading. Let's say north of a hundred megabytes of data into Opa. It's a very concrete one.

Another is that you're starting to have to build a bunch of infrastructure around Opa in order to pull data in into open to begin with and then another one is that you know, maybe you've had an outage as you've been running open because you did deploy a policy to it that or data to it and you weren't as confident as I clearly you needed to be before you made that before you made that change. Cool that I think people that's what people need. Hey tip for people who want to get more information.

We didn't even give them like a website. com, right? com/sload or just hit load off the front page?

What's the best way? com grab go to the products menu and click on the Stylo link. It's the best place actually.

Hey man, I'll see you in about a month. Hopefully in Amsterdam until that go check out styra load Tim gave you the the three symptoms if you recognize any of those it might be something worth your while until then. We're out right now Tim great seeing you will see you soon.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with another guest.