Consent-Driven Continuous Delivery with Open Policy Agent and Spinnaker

Abstract

Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines require robust governance to balance automation with compliance, security, and auditability. Traditional manual approval processes introduce bottlenecks, while static policy enforcement lacks flexibility. This research introduces a consent-driven CD framework integrating Open Policy Agent (OPA)—a declarative policy engine—with Spinnaker, a leading open-source CD platform. The framework leverages OPA's dynamic policy-as-code capabilities to automate deployment consents based on contextual rules (e.g., security scans, environment risks, or regulatory requirements). By decoupling policy logic from Spinnaker's orchestration, our approach enables granular, auditable, and real-time consent decisions without halting pipelines for human intervention. We validate the solution through a case study demonstrating reduced deployment latency by 65%, elimination of manual approval backlogs, and consistent enforcement of organizational policies. The integration establishes a scalable, compliant CD workflow adaptable to evolving operational demands, proving that policy-driven automation enhances both velocity and governance in modern DevOps environments.