Policy as Code

Policy as Code is the practice of expressing compliance, security, and operational rules as version-controlled, machine-executable code , enforced automatically in the pipeline rather than reviewed manually after the fact. We adopt it under Technique in the garden.

Summary

Policy as Code is a strong adopt in any DevSecOps or regulated environment. Manual compliance reviews don’t scale and introduce human error; codified policies run on every PR, in every environment, consistently. Start with the highest-risk surface (Kubernetes admission, IaC security rules) and expand from there. OPA + Conftest is the recommended starting point , the learning curve for Rego is real but the payoff in automated governance is significant. Pairs well with GitOps: policy checks become just another gate in the pull request pipeline.