Policy-as-Code with OPA Gatekeeper: Stopping Cloud Waste Before It Deploys

Your cloud account has Service Control Policies. Your Terraform pipelines have compliance checks. Your tagging strategy covers 90% of resources. And last Thursday, a developer deployed a pod requesting 64 CPU cores and 256 GB of memory into a dev namespace with no resource quotas. SCPs operate at the cloud API layer. They can prevent someone from launching a p4d.24xlarge instance. They cannot see what happens inside a Kubernetes cluster. Between the cloud guardrails and the running workload, the