Migrating Policy Delivery Engines with (almost) Nobody Knowing

Migrating Policy Delivery Engines with (almost) Nobody Knowing

摘要

Several years ago, Pinterest had a short incident due to oversights in the policy delivery engine. This engine is the technology that ensures a policy document written by a developer and checked into source control is fully delivered to the production system evaluating that policy, similar to OPAL. This incident began a multi-year journey for our team to rethink policy delivery and migrate hundreds of policies to a new distribution model. We shared details about our former policy delivery system in a conference talk from Kubecon 2019.

At a high level, there are three important architectural decisions we’d like to bring attention to for this story.