Descope vs. Opal.dev

I am frustrated that my organization chose to adopt Opal for our access management tool. It is extremely difficult to use, due to bugs and basic functionality missing. Engineers are not given write access to production resources, so every change must flow through Opal.

This involves writing an IAM policy by hand for every request, because it is far too difficult to find an existing role in the system, and requests must the narrowly tailored only to allow the exact operation requested. Opal makes this process much more difficult because it lacks basic functionality for end users, such as: -Ability to modify an existing IAM role

-Ability to view existing IAM roles

-Ability to delete duplicate Opal roles

-Lack of IAM role templates

-Poor error messages when attempting JSON policy fails validation

In general, each Opal request takes 5-10 minutes because you need to be very explicit with every API action you are requesting, which then needs to be repeated multiple times because it is very hard to get everything correct the first time, which then requires a new round of reviews. This is partially because AWS IAM roles can be tricky to get right, but Opal provides no functionality to make this easier.

Incentivized

• Inability to modify an IAM role after creation
• Inability to use templated IAM roles
• Inability to see existing IAM roles
• Inability for users to clean up existing Opal roles
• Poor ability to search for existing Opal roles
• Repeated reliability issues - IAM role creation breaks far too often
• Cryptic error messages when IAM JSON is incorrect

Incentivized

• Decreased engineering productivity

Incentivized