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Horrible developer experience
May 01, 2024

Horrible developer experience

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Opal

Our organization uses Opal for permissions requests into production environments and for access management.

When users need access to a tool, they are typically directed to request it through Opal and then the appropriate reviewers are configured to approve.
  • Pretty UI
  • 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
  • Decreased engineering productivity

Do you think Opal delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Opal's feature set?

No

Did Opal live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Opal go as expected?

No

Would you buy Opal again?

No

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.