DevSecOps meets GitOps with Trusted Delivery

Introduction

Today's organizations strive for success and seek to remain ahead of the competition, they must expedite the flow of business value to their consumers and organize the teams to deliver value faster.

However, the data breaches of recent times have made security more critical than it was ever before. The decentralized nature of cloud infrastructure dramatically expands the threat landscape and presents several security risks and concerns that businesses must address.

The authentication giant Okta recently reported that a security vulnerability enabled hackers to access the company's internal network, affecting several corporate clients of its customer base.

Cloud misconfigurations and security threats are some of the major challenges and concerns that the organizations must combat. The good news is that there are several tools, procedures, technologies, and processes have evolved to combat this challenge. This article talks about how to shift security left, GitOps, policy as code, and how they all come together in Trusted Delivery. 

What is GitOps?

GitOps, coined by Weaveworks in 2017,  encompasses DevOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices, leveraging Git as the single source of truth. It can help enhance business value and streamline infrastructure management. Developers may use GitOps to concentrate on designing apps rather than configuring and maintaining Kubernetes clusters or dealing with other operations-related duties. Organizations are embracing GitOps strategies for various reasons, including increased productivity, quicker deployment frequency, and improved security.

 Although GitOps continues to be a transformative trend, the increased speed and automation can lead to misconfiguration, which could compromise the stability and security of applications. These security vulnerabilities impede progress since they often cause significant delays for developers, who spend a lot of time and effort investigating them.

That said, the conundrum here is how enterprises can retain their speed and frequency of deployments while being safe and reliable. Enter Trusted Delivery.

Shifting Security Left: Trusted Delivery

Trusted Delivery encompasses helping development teams to release applications as early as possible while safeguarding them with automated guard rails. These safeguards are enforced by leveraging policy as code. Security and compliance rules are codified and integrated into the system per the organization's security and compliance policies.

You can promote frequent deployments by enforcing security guardrails while maintaining the reliability of your application platform. Trusted delivery of applications extends GitOps with governance, verifiability, and security via Magalix's policy enforcement tool.

Trusted application delivery helps the development teams to deploy quickly while securing the deployment with automated guard rails. These guard rails are implemented via the use of Policy as code. Security and compliance regulations are written using code and incorporated into the system as per requirements.

Download this whitepaper to learn about the security challenges for cloud-native applications, Trusted Delivery using policy as code, and more. 

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is a paradigm shift that acknowledges and applies security principles in the development lifecycle. To achieve this, security testing should be shifted left - it should be performed earlier in the lifecycle as part of the development process rather than later.

With the help of DevSecOps and GitOps, enterprise organizations can more easily address evolving security needs and increase the agility with which they develop their software. DevSecOps is an evolution of DevOps that focuses on security throughout application development. It’s a way to establish a culture of continuous delivery and growth while also making it easier to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.

GitOps and DevSecOps offer enterprises many benefits, including increased speed, efficiency, and agility for delivering trusted software in production.

Policy as code is a concept that entails coding and enforcing policies to secure your infrastructure and eliminate human errors. It is the notion of creating code in a high-level language for regulating, administering, and automating policies. With Policy as code in place, you can write programs to govern security, compliance, and different rules throughout your application's lifecycle.

Best practices of DevSecOps: Building a Trusted Software Supply Chain

Test-driven development (TDD) and continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) are practices that foster a DevSecOps culture and trust. Deploying new software at a rapid pace necessitates trust that the software is compliant, of high quality, and secure by default. Here are a few best practices that should be adhered to for the success of DevSecOps in an enterprise:

• You should train your developers on secure coding practices.
• You should automate tools and processes.
• Security vulnerabilities should be treated as defects.
• Measure, measure, and measure at every step.
• Declare the dependencies in code.
• Above all, foster a DevSecOps culture and mindset.

DevOps, DevSecOps, and GitOps - The Future

With the surge in the use of Git throughout the IT landscape, GitOps will continue to gain traction. DevOps integrates operations and development, whereas GitOps speeds up the whole process - it is a kind of automation that can adapt to the changing nature of the cloud. While GitOps is not a subset of DevOps, the two methodologies will eventually merge. DevOps has grown in popularity in recent years, and GitOps is a logical extension of that, bringing teams closer together and centering them around Git.

DevSecOps strives to provide security while also allowing for speedier development and operations. DevSecOps will be a critical component in the software development process. Inside the CI and CD pipelines, you must have dedicated security measures. Automated security awareness and action will be an inherent element of the pipeline processes.

You must have the correct mentality, comprehend the shared responsibility model, and implement practices that support the approach and continuous improvement. Organizations must concentrate on what technology they should use in the future and ensure that they are current with what the industry offers.

Trusted Delivery with Weave GitOps

Trusted Delivery - available now with weave GitOps -  is a solution that provides you with commit time, build time, deploy time, and run-time checks so that you can develop one policy, and apply it anywhere in your software development lifecycle.

Weave GitOps includes policy as code checks to ensure that misconfigurations are automatically detected, notified and the deployment halted. The policy engine is built off Open Policy Agent (OPA), using the Magalix Platform,  and includes a curated library of over a hundred policies covering: security, resilience and coding standards. 

Download a Free version today or book a Demo to see how Weave GitOps enables you to manage a fleet of clusters, securely and confidently.