Open Policy Agent · Rate Limits

Open Policy Agent Rate Limits

Open Policy Agent has no centrally enforced rate limits because the engine is operated by the consumer. Throughput depends on the deployment topology (sidecar, daemonset, library) and underlying hardware. Operators commonly front OPA with their own gateway and apply throttling there.

1 Limits Throttle: 429

PoliciesStandardsRate LimitingOpen Source

Limits

Self-hosted throughput deployment

varies

see operator deployment sizing

OPA throughput is bounded by host CPU and policy complexity; benchmark for your workload.

Policies

Operator-controlled

Because OPA is self-hosted, all rate limiting is the operator's responsibility — typically enforced by an upstream API gateway, service mesh, or ingress controller.

Decision caching

Use bundle service polling and decision caching to reduce evaluation pressure under high query rates.