Author: Gilbert Martin

Cyber threats are growing exponentially, both in volume and sophistication. A major portion of these threats can go unidentified, or they are detected too late for an organization to avoid data breaches or other related risks. The tangible costs of any cyber attack range from stolen critical data and damaged systems to regulatory fines, legal actions, and financial loss. At the same time, the intangible costs include loss of competitive advantage, loss of customer trust, and overall damage to brand reputation. 

The threat landscape is only expanding as businesses are adopting new digital technologies such as cloud computing, automation, AI, and ML at greater scale and with greater speed. With stakes higher than ever, it is imperative for organizations, irrespective of their business nature and size, a roust Security Posture to identify, prevent, and respond to ever-evolving cyber threats. 

Code Reviews

Code review is a crucial part of software development. Code review, also called peer code review, is the act of deliberately and systematically coordinating with fellow programmers to verify each other’s code for mistakes. A code review helps developers enhance the quality of code before merging and shipping it. It serves as a quality assurance of the code base. It is a methodical assessment of code designed to identify bugs, improve code quality, and help developers learn the source code. It also accelerates and streamlines the process of software development like no other practice can.

When done accurately, code reviews save time, streamline the development process upfront and significantly reduce the volume of work required later of QA teams. Reviews can also save money, particularly by identifying the types of bugs that might escape undetected through testing, production, and into the end-users’ laptops, whose reviews may lead to a decline in the sales of your product.

DevOps has dramatically changed the way IT businesses operate and innovate. It enabled them to develop and deliver products at a speed and scale. Amid this paradigm shift, the business realized that the traditional "bolt-on" security techniques and manual controls that are reliant on legacy practices are not keeping pace with high-velocity, continuous delivery software development. Indeed, in the DevOps ecosystem, the security aspect was tackled by a separate security team and quality assurance teams at the end of the software development cycle (as an afterthought), which created an unacceptable bottleneck. And DevSecOps seeks to solve this security conundrum by integrating security practices and controls throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

DevSecOps addresses security issues as they emerge before they're pushed into production, when they're easier and less expensive to fix. Moreover, it makes the application and infrastructure security a shared responsibility of the development, security, and IT operations teams, rather than the sole responsibility of the security engineers. As security is backed into every phase of the DevOps lifecycle, the business can now build more secure, high-quality software at speed and scale. 

The ability to ship software at speed has become imperative to stay competitive in today’s ever-evolving digital world. Fortunately, DevOps has enabled IT businesses to embrace speed by seamlessly collaborating with developers and operations teams and automating the processes across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). However, there’s a catch. While DevOps has indeed facilitated high-paced software delivery, the security considerations are often overlooked, which led to subpar application security. 

Moreover, security teams often considered security as an infrastructural component rather than an application design element. Basic practices such as firewalls that secure the borders are deemed sufficient. This approach fails utterly when applications are hosted in environments beyond enterprise infrastructure, such as the cloud, containers, or serverless computing platforms. Moreover, introducing security testing at the final phases of the software development lifecycle inherently causes friction, slowing business teams from realizing the speed and scale of unrestricted DevOps. 

Software companies today often face two significant challenges —  delivering at speed and innovating at scale. And DevOps helps address these challenges by imbibing automation throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to develop and deliver high-quality software.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is the critical component of automation in a DevOps practice. It automates code builds, testing, and deployment so businesses can ship code changes faster and more reliably. However, one must continuously monitor their CI/CD pipeline to realize the DevOps promise.

In recent years, organizations worldwide have started leveraging DevOps to deliver high-quality products at high speed. Every DevOps team is busy automating everything, with constant discussions about continuous integration, continuous delivery, automated deployments, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code. Though automation has enabled the business to realize some of the benefits of DevOps, the dozens of non-collaborative tools in their DevOps toolchain made the task of automation a technically complex and arduous task. As DevOps automation reached its limitations, DevOps orchestration has emerged as the logical next step of automation. Let's dig deep and learn the ins and outs of DevOps orchestration.

What Is DevOps Orchestration?

DevOps orchestration is the process of automating a set of several independent automated tasks to streamline and optimize the entire DevOps workflow. It is the automated coordination and management of your entire DevOps practices and automation tools you have implemented to accelerate the software development life cycle (SDLC). This significantly minimizes production issues, accelerates time to market, improves the efficiency of your automation tools, and increases the ROI of your DevOps investments. DevOps orchestration includes continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, containerization, cloud-based services, monitoring, and analytics.