I’m guiding a 90-day rollout to unify AWS and Azure under a single governance model, and the blocker isn’t tools — it’s making guardrails invisible to delivery. If you’ve paired OPA/Conftest in GitHub Actions with Azure Policy and AWS SCPs, what minimal controls (tagging, region allowlists, budget alerts) kept auditors happy without slowing CI/CD?
But > SCPs, what minimal controls (tagging, region allowlists, budget alerts) kept auditors happy without We made one hard gate: a required owner tag enforced by OPA in GitHub Actions and mirrored with Azure Policy plus AWS Tag Policies; auditors got traceability, and we derived budgets and region exceptions from that tag without slowing builds. Caveat: we ran warn-only in dev for 30 days before flipping to block — would that work for your teams?
Building on @h_keith67: we made the only hard gates ‘region allowlist’ and ‘no public endpoints’ (Azure Policy Deny + AWS SCP), with OPA warning on everything else and auto-creating a ticket plus a 30‑day expiring exemption; budgets are auto-wired from the owner tag at repo create. Small caveat: add a break‑glass label that logs to SIEM — one speed bump, not a toll booth; would that fit your flow?
We set ‘break-glass’ via PR label with 24h auto-expiry; auditors loved the trail. Need per-team quotas?
The one hard gate that’s stayed invisible for us is “logs must flow to central sinks,” enforced by OPA in CI and org-level controls: AWS CloudTrail/Config to a log account with S3/KMS, and Azure diagnostic settings to a shared Log Analytics workspace… We keep most checks warn-only, but also block deploys missing encryption at rest (KMS/Key Vault) since auditors treat that like seatbelts — do you already have the cross-cloud log pipe? If not, this Rego primer is a quick lift: Open Policy Agent (OPA) | Open Policy Agent.