The responsibility and accountability for security is rapidly shifting toward DevOps engineers, as they have greater visibility into the broader architecture of processes and systems used to deploy applications. Effective DevSecOps makes application deployments, operations, and service monitoring easier and more secure. In particular, DevOps engineers will be responsible for securing the Infrastructure as Code in which they build. In this Refcard, we explore IaC security, how it works, why it's important, and core practices for success.
Misconfigurations are the leading cause behind security incidents in Kubernetes-orchestrated or otherwise containerized environments. Without proper configuration in place, applications would run into problems ranging from noncompliance and inconsistencies to performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and functionality failure. Therefore, configuration management is a critical component in a software development lifecycle for maintaining systems in a desired, consistent state.
According to Red Hat’s State of Kubernetes Security report, misconfigurations were the leading cause behind security incidents in Kubernetes-orchestrated or otherwise containerized environments. Without proper configuration in place, applications would run into problems ranging from noncompliance and inconsistencies to performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and functionality failure. This would make cloud-native systems unstable and cause them to become a liability to businesses. For this reason, configuration management is a critical component in a software development lifecycle for maintaining systems in a desired, consistent state. However, the way configuration management is done has been evolving over the years. This post traces the history of configuration management, focusing on how GitOps handles this critical aspect of running cloud-native applications today.
Cloud operations are complex. There are a lot of reasons for this complexity, but in this post, I want to focus on how resources and services are managed in today’s clouds. Cloud today is oftentimes comprised of a large number of heterogeneous resources that have altogether different methods for managing them.
This diversity of resources is in large part the byproduct of cloud practices that predate infrastructure as code (IaC). Before automation and IaC, many companies would configure resources and services manually, without any alignment to best practices, based on internal processes that are unique to the organization. As companies evolved, and adopted IaC for codifying and managing cloud resources, this created a mishmash of services that are managed and unmanaged.
GitOps is a pattern for the continuous deployment of cloud-native apps. The infrastructure is operated with the help of continuous deployment tools and a Git repository, which contains information concerning the necessary infrastructure and automated processes. You only need to update your Git repository to update a specific app or deploy a new cloud app.
For instance, the GitOps environment makes it possible to deploy apps more often, safely, and faster without switching between diverse options. Developers possess a unique opportunity to release updates up to several times a day and implement them, deploying instantly and monitoring the results in real-time. Moreover, they can collect feedback, and, if necessary, make changes or roll back to a previous version of the product. So, GitOps is the best thing you can do with configuration as code. But there are nuances too.
The main feature of the Kubernetes cloud OS is that any module in the cluster can interact seamlessly with another module. Although the user gets unlimited access to useful platforms and new features at the same time, such a model is fraught with potential risks and vulnerabilities.
In this regard, there are two radically different approaches to security: shift to the right and shift to the left, static and dynamic approach.
Running infrastructure at any scale almost always guarantees a dizzying array of components and configurations. To further complicate things, different teams within an organization may need similar infrastructures with slight variations. Additionally, that infrastructure may be spread over multiple topographies, from on-premise to one or more cloud vendors.
Terraform is Hashicorp’s service offering that can provision infrastructure across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers, in addition to safely and efficiently re-provisioning infrastructure in response to configuration changes.
Although SRE toolsets vary from one team to another, there is one type of tool, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), that virtually every SRE needs to manage reliability at scale. If you’re not leveraging IaC, you’re not being all you can be as an SRE.
Keep reading for a breakdown of how IaC works, why it’s so important to SRE, and how SREs can add IaC to their reliability engineering strategy.
Open Policy Agent is an open-source engine that provides a way of declaratively writing policies as code and then using those policies as part of a decision-making process. It uses a policy language called Rego, allowing you to write policies for different services using the same language.
OPA can be used for a number of purposes, including:
Pretty URLs, aka vanity URLs, aka tiny URLs, are great for improving SEO and the UX. They’re shorter versions of a domain, making them useful for copy-pasting and printing. There are already plenty of domain shortening services out there. But with Jekyll and Netlify I can configure pretty URLs all by my lonesome!
What I want to achieve is as follows.
Why automate IT infrastructure? Actually, automating is not the best solution only for IT infrastructure, but for many things in software development. And why?
Manual processes are slow, highly vulnerable to human failure, not scalable, hard to create, update and keep a standard, etc. I could cite many other reasons for anyone to run away from any manual processes. They are the opposite that is proposed in agile methodologies or DevOps culture. Now specifically about infrastructure, we can affirm that without automating it's impossible to get the best of the resources of any Cloud service. We can see the why in the next lines.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) is critical for developing cloud-native applications at scale, but with added complexity comes added security considerations. If gone undetected, one IaC misconfiguration can snowball into hundreds of alerts and cloud risk.
In this talk, we analyzed the most common AWS misconfigurations within Bridgecrew’s IaC scan data to illustrate the importance of IaC security. We’ll walk through each of the misconfigurations, the potential risk they pose, and show how to fix them.
In a typical infrastructure build, developers and IT operation teams work coherently to plan, code, develop, and deploy application infrastructure by creating multiple instances and environments to code, test, and run their applications in. However, many complications can arise during the manual development and operations processes within such a build pipeline. Human fallibility is inevitable in any scenario where repetitive manual processes are the norm and everyone is guilty of making mistakes at work; dev and ops engineers are no different. The consequences of such mistakes are that the build process takes more time, energy, and resources to identify and fix errors in the pipeline so the whole process is affected, delayed, and more costly than planned.
As part of this typical infrastructure build pipeline, development and operations teams are also responsible for individually maintaining multiple deployment environments. Managing multiple environments is a further difficulty to shoulder with each of them operating to its own configuration settings.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) means that you use code to define and manage infrastructure rather than using manual processes. More broadly, and perhaps more importantly, IaC is about bringing software engineering principles and approaches to cloud infrastructure. In this Refcard, explore the fundamentals of IaC and how to get started setting up your environment.
With the advent of cloud automation technology, infrastructure as code (IaC) obtains the ability to turn complex systems and environments into a few lines of code that can be deployed even at the click of a button. This new IT infrastructure also automated dev/test pipelines, which provide a rapid feedback loop for developers and rapid deployment of new features for end-users.
The above facts indicate the core best practices of DevOps — like virtualized tests, version control, and continuous monitoring — come to the underlying code, which governs the formation and administration of your business infrastructure. In another way, you can also say infrastructure will be considered the same way that any other code would be.
![IaC Methodologies, Approach, and Best Practices]()
IaC Overview
As everything is digitized now, especially after the Covid pandemic, it is now even more important to properly manage the IT infrastructure of an organization.
Earlier, this management of IT infrastructure was done manually by the system administrators. They managed all the hardware and software that was required for an application to run. Tech has progressed a lot in the past few years, and now there is an alternative to this manual management, called Infrastructure as Code or IaC in short.
For many users, preparing an environment in AWS to host their website/system can be tough, especially if they’re new to cloud and what that actually means.
Also, after the preparation is done, the creation of resources might take a while, too! But what if you could do all of the following in just twenty minutes?
Environment drift becomes an expensive business waste. Bugs and failures happen because teams build against a staging or development environment and then find upon deployment that the production environment is out of sync, which leads to a time-consuming investigation of why and what is missing. Therefore today, on behalf of Apiumhub team, I would like to discuss Infrastructure as code and it’s benefits.
Infrastructure as Code evolved to solve the problem of environment drift in the release pipeline. The idea of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was spurred on by the success of CI/CD. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) automates the provisioning of infrastructure, enabling your organization to develop, deploy, and scale cloud applications with greater speed, less risk, and reduced cost.
GitOps offers a way to automate and manage infrastructure. It does this by using the same DevOps best practices that many teams already use, such as version control, code review, and CI/CD pipelines.
Companies have been adopting DevOps because of its great potential to improve productivity and software quality. Along the way, we’ve found ways to automate the software development lifecycle. But when it comes to infrastructure setup and deployments, it’s still mostly a manual process.
