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.
This article is a continuation of a series of posts about our project named Portfolio Architectures. The previous post, Portfolio Architecture Examples: Healthcare Collection, begins with a project overview, introduction, and examples of tooling and workshops available for the project. You may want to refer back to that post to gain insight into the background of Portfolio Architectures before reading further.
Automation Collection
The collection featured today is centered around automation architectures. There are currently six architectures in this collection and we'll provide a short overview of each, leaving the in-depth exploration as an exercise for the reader.
With the increased reliance on various technologies for software development, both software and hardware need to grow along with those technologies to provide reliable and secure services. However, this need has led to creating more complex solutions than ever. Thus, the importance of robust infrastructure has come to the forefront to deliver these solutions reliably at a global scale. Due to these facts, the platform team has to face different challenges to provide and maintain this infrastructure without affecting the software development lifecycle (SDLC) or end-users.
What Is a Platform Team?
We have Dev for development, QA for testing, and likewise, the platform team for managing the infrastructure of an organization. This infrastructure includes both internal SDLC resources like CI/CD pipelines, staging/testing environments, production resources, and in most cases, managing software deployments. The platform team will handle most operational aspects of an SDLC. They are the key component that manages most of DevOps tools and platforms, bringing the full benefits of DevOps.
Continuous configuration occurs when a configuration platform is used to automate, monitor, design, and manage otherwise manual processes, which are essential components of improving the overall efficiency and success of your team's SDLC. There are several areas to prioritize in a continuous configuration methodology — the right tools for building a continuous deployment pipeline, effective pipeline maintenance and management, and, of course, widespread automation.
In addition to covering key benefits of continuous configuration, our Refcard details specific concepts and foundations of this modern approach to DevOps, including build automation, infrastructure as code, configuration monitoring and management, enforcement in CI/CD processes, and more!
