Simplifying CI/CD Governance and Security for Multi-cloud Microservices

What is DevSecOps?

Getting started with your DevOps Transformations can become complex, considering your current DevOps practices. Identifying and closing gaps across the DevOps processes becomes a priority, often overshadowing the most important aspect that has to logically follow next: Governance and Compliance. Otherwise termed DevSecOps, it demands a transformational shift in how your teams function across every phase of the DevOps pipeline. Enterprise DevOps Transformations often remain incomplete with overheads in orchestrating such a shift, mainly due to lack of supporting tools to drive collaboration, visibility and security.
Enterprise DevOps Transformations often remain incomplete with overheads in orchestrating such a shift, mainly due to lack of supporting tools to drive collaboration, visibility and security.

Most of you might know the 4 dimensions for effective DevSecOps implementation:

1. People
2. Process
3. Technology
4. Governance

Our team at Ozone Cloud Inc, has carefully designed the Ozone CI/CD platform such that all 4 dimensions seamlessly come together across all phases of DevOps, irrespective of your IT infrastructure. It gives you the flexibility to select or bring your own tools or benefit from out-of-the-box capabilities for security and collaboration.

You can now adopt efficient DevSecOps practices in a short timespan with automation, intelligent secrets management, custom workflows and authentications, powered by meaningful insights. In the following sections, we have broken down each of the 4 dimensions mentioned above within Ozone for better relatability.

People:

Security is key to DevSecOps. Rather than it becoming a hindrance, security has to become a frame of mind. It’s important to be embedded right across the development & operational phases and is highly dependent  on the platform you use to orchestrate DevOps.

The Ozone CI/CD platform helps align DevOps and Security teams towards the common goal of DevSecOps by breaking down silos into structured workflows. One such example is the role based access and a wide range of controls (RBAC) that can be defined for a user across 11 permission levels (for cloud providers, clusters, pipelines, environments, stages, and more). Enterprises can define RBAC in a way that fosters seamless coordination between the security, development and operations teams across DevOps phases. This is vital to initiate a cultural change in people to shift-left security.

Process:

To further improve team collaborations, an efficient process needs to be in place that focuses on securing development and operations. Hybrid and multi-cloud microservice deployments are inherently complicated, making secure deployments a challenge. When you scale in production, these challenges are compounded. A smart way to tackle them when you scale, especially across multiple clouds, is to have re-usable pipelines: something that can be defined once for a single or multiple applications and can be run multiple times as and when you deploy. This templated approach requires a lesser learning curve and facilitates coordination and sync-ups among teams which is vital for governance.

Such a simplified process can help drive shared responsibility, collaboration and accountability between the DevOps and security teams, especially given the amount of time saved due to standardization. This simplified deployment approach can also help define touchpoints where security processes like scanning or testing can take place before, during and after deployments and not just during the CI phases of DevOps.

Ozone, being built on the Tekton framework, uses standard Tekton Pipelines and has an in-built catalogue of over a 100 tasks and events that can be used as building blocks to configure any kind of a pipeline for deploying modern apps across multiple clouds. Here’s a look at the GUI based pipeline configuration where pipelines can be built with just a few clicks:

It helps save time and focus on optimising processes that unify and secure all the teams across all the phases of DevOps.

Technology:

Any technology you use needs to be capable of handling multi-functional dimensions of development, operations, and security. It has to integrate with different processes and requires flexibility to be designed, accommodated around the teams and enterprise demands. Typically, it’s the other way round where technology you use dictates how teams function giving an undesirable or a limited outcome.

Technology in DevSecOps typically relates to automation of vital DevOps processes and recurring security tasks that can help foster secure practices.  It can also focus on your toolchain (external and open source tools) that are being used for the purpose of collaborations, notifications, security, analytics, testing, monitoring, and many more.

It is a best practice to minimise the number of technologies that a pipeline usually goes through. This reduces uncertainties, probabilities of failures, and overheads caused by external tool dependencies. A unified platform that not only integrates with these tools, but also delivers end-to-end value with customization and automation can help re-define DevSecOps technology. Here’s a look at how Ozone leverages technology with ease to enhance DevSecOps:

• Secrets management is a very important part of DevSecOps. Ozone injects secrets right into the pipeline across DevOps stages, thus reducing manual configurations.
• Shift-left DevSecOps with runtime scans to trace vulnerabilities long before you hit production
• Enterprises can leverage Single Sign-on (SSO) authentication with multiple protocols like  OAuth, LDAP, AD, and more for unifying people and processes on the Ozone platform
• Private tunnel: Ozone offers whitelisted and secure communications to private clusters for deployments, monitoring, and logging across public and private clouds
• ML-based deployment verifications help eliminate human errors and overheads while monitoring your cross-cloud microservice deployments and automating roll-backs should there be anomalies
• Audit trails and traceability with intuitive dashboards for delivering meaningful insights

Ozone’s  standardized approach to Kubernetes deployments coupled with cutting-edge technology, helps DevOps and security teams weave an efficient net of workflows and processes that are specific to their use cases. This helps simplify the very aspect for which DevSecOps is aimed at achieving: Governance and Compliance.

Governance:

This dimension deals with measuring gaps in people, processes and technology. Governance provides a framework that ensures people  are in sync with processes and  in-line with tooling and integrations. Having good technology but cumbersome processes for working them will still cause pipelines to fail and the teams to burnout.

The Ozone CI/CD platform lets you establish your own ‘guide-rails’ to govern the entire DevOps cycle and teams. Processes of building and deploying applications across clouds, monitoring deployments and initiating rollbacks can become increasingly manual, demanding a lot of attention from developers, operations, and security teams. By automating recurring manual processes, Ozone saves you time and focuses on DevSecOps courtesy out-of-the-box capabilities like secrets management within the pipeline, runtime scans, private tunnels, and more.

Governance is not a goal-driven process but a continuous activity that requires supporting platforms that can help re-design the operational & compliance framework. With Ozone, you get:

• Enhanced security with automation as it helps make DevOps ‘secure by design’
• Advanced efficiency as you get to shift-left security scans and detect vulnerabilities long before you hit production
• Effective Collaboration due to granular RBAC and authentication protocols that can be configured as per enterprise requirements
• Better Compliance of modern business applications that require very high availabilities, security and scaling capabilities

Scalable DevSecOps for Enterprise Governance

For enterprises, a sustainable DevSecOps model is imperative and has to seamlessly merge with CI/CD practices. Here’s how Ozone helps you establish or even migrate your existing DevSecOps model (if you happen to have one) onto the platform:

• DevSecOps user roles and KRAs: If you are deploying at scale or already have multiple apps to take care of, having well defined roles and responsibilities for CI/CD can go a long way in efficient multi-functional team operations. With upto 11 levels of granular RBAC, Ozone gives you the freedom of configuring your teams’ access as per your guidelines
• The team at Ozone can help define DevSecOps policies and frameworks or help define your existing policies on the Ozone CI/CD platform, so that you don’t break the pace of your deployments
• Automation and Continuous Monitoring lets CI/CD and security teams save time and improve their DevOps KPIs like availability, change failure rates, release frequencies, rollbacks, etc.

Set up a call with our team now or book a demo to kickstart your DevSecOps journey!