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Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as "devops automation"

Shift Left Security: Upgrade DevOps Automation Services And Kubernetes For 4 Phases of Container Lifecycle

Even with automation processes in place, DevOps tests can take an inordinate amount of time to execute. Also, Kubernetes has grown into a de facto container orchestration system in the modern digital landscape. This implies that the number and variety of tests will only grow considerably as containerized projects scale, resulting in significant SDLC inefficiencies. With the pace being a priority feature for DevOps automation services and Kubernetes both, the increasingly complex projects cannot do with existing test performance. A ray of hope comes in the form of “shifting the test automation to the left in SDLC”. Shift Left encourages early testing where the testing strategy is essentially preponed in the development process. Moreover, with DevSecOps gaining popularity in mainstream IT business, the concept of “shifting left” is beneficial for Kubernetes and the overall CI/CD security as well. In this blog, we will take a look at Shift Left Testing Automation and understand its performance and security implications for DevOps automation services and Kubernetes. Shift Left Testing Shift left testing is a technique for speeding up software testing and making development easier by bringing the testing process forward in the development cycle. It is done by the DevOps team to ensure application security at the earliest phases of the development lifecycle, as part of a DevSecOps organizational pattern. Shift left testing focuses on integration. We can find out integration concerns earlier by moving integration testing as early as possible. This will aid in resolving integration concerns in the early stages, when architectural changes may be made. This, like other DevOps methods, encourages flexibility and allows the project team to scale their efforts to increase productivity. Embracing the Shift Left Testing approach Bugs can occur in any code. Depending on the error type, bugs might be minor (low risk) or major (high risk). It is always important to find the bugs earlier, as it allows development teams to fix software quickly and avoid lengthy end-of-phase testing. Better Code Quality: In Shift right testing all bugs are fixed at once. In contrast to this shift left uses an approach to detect the bug in the early stage that improves communication between testing and development teams. Cost-effective: Detecting bugs early saves time and money on the project. This can be helpful to launch a product on time. Better Testing Collaboration: Shift-left strategies take advantage of “automation” regularly. It enables them to do continuous testing to save time. Secure Codebase: Shift-left security encourages more security testing throughout the development period, which enhances test coverage. Teams can write code keeping security in mind from the beginning of a project, avoiding haphazard and awkward fixes later on. Shortened market time: Overall, shift-left security has the potential to improve delivery speed. Developers will have less wait time and there will be fewer bottlenecks when releasing new features thanks to improved security workflows and automation. Ensure that their shift-left strategies are contemporary and capable of dealing with today’s application testing performance concerns, organizations can also benefit from their security features. Understanding Shift Left Security for DevOps and K8s Security testing has traditionally been carried out at the end of the development cycle. This was a major from a debugging point of view, requiring teams to untangle multiple factors at once. As a result, this increased the risk of releasing software that lacked necessary security features. Shifting security left aims to build software with security best practices built-in, as well as to detect and resolve any security concerns and vulnerabilities as early as feasible in the development process. Moreover, Kubernetes security is more vulnerable to threat actors as they are constantly looking for exploiting overlooked bugs. Shift left allows the security to be embedded into every aspect of the container life cycle i.e. – “Develop,” “Distribute,” “Deploy,” and “Runtime.” Here’s how Shift left work with these four phases: Develop: Security can be introduced early in the application lifecycle with cloud-native tools. You can detect and respond to compliance issues and misconfigurations early by conducting security testing. Distribute: While using third-party runtime images, open-source software, this phase gets more challenging. Here, artifacts or container images require continuous automated inspection and update to prevent the risk. Deploy: Continuous validation of candidate workload properties, secure workload observability capabilities, and real-time logging of accessible data enables when security is integrated throughout the development and distribution phases. Runtime: Policy enforcement and resource restriction features must be included in cloud-native systems from the start. When workloads are incorporated into higher application lifecycle stages in a cloud-native environment, the runtime resource limits for workloads often limit visibility. Breaking down the cloud-native environment into small layers of interconnected components to address this difficulty is advisable. Conclusion A software flaw can cause a huge economic disruption, a massive data breach, or a cyber-attack. The ‘Shift Left’ concept resulted in a significant change for the overall ‘Testing’ role. Previously, the only focus of Testing was simply on ‘Defect Detection,’ but now the goal is to detect the bugs in the early stages to reduce the complexity at the end. Also, we all know that cyber-attacks will continue, but early and frequent testing can help detect vulnerabilities in software and build stronger resilience. For all the unforeseen disruptions to come, Shift Left is the direction one cannot deter from.

Aziro Marketing

CI/CD security devops devops automation

Test Automation 2022: DevOps Automation Strategies Need Better Focus On Environment and Configuration Management

With the advent of DevOps, even the once cumbersome task of deployment is now quite automatic with something as easily manageable as a Jenkins file. It’s is the fact of our times that the DevOps pipelines have made the entire development process faster, easier, and better. Gone are the days when developers are stumped by issues in different OS, browsers, or locales. However, the testers still sometimes struggle to find issues reported by a particular user in a particular locale or OS. There are certain environmental and configurational anomalies that still feel excluded from the comfort of Automation that DevOps was intended for in the first place. The question arises, how we bring Environment and Configuration Management under the garb of automation in a way that they don’t disrupt the existing DevOps pipeline, but enhance it.The Ecosystem for Automation and SoftwareSoftware is ubiquitous. Users are now, more than ever, aware of their dependency on the digital landscape thriving on sophisticated applications highly scalable digital services. With the growth of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), many users now use low-code development platforms to create software that meets their absolute needs with details. These all are firm and positive steps towards optimal and efficient Automation. A major challenge that now the DevOps teams are facing is to monitor at surface level as well as deeper levels in their different corresponding environments. The only way to not be stumped by these kinds of anomalies is to fix them before they catch us off-guard.Automating the process of testing in different environments is now becoming an essential part of the development process. Unit testing, integration testing, load testing, alpha/beta testing, user acceptance testing are different testing processes, each aimed at different goals. The complexity of those systems could be minimal. But while simulating for pre-production or production environments, the complexities would be higher. Tracking of servers, resources, credentials become easy with proper configuration management, which comprises of the below steps:Identify the system-wide configuration needs for each environment.Control the changes in the configuration. For example, the database to connect may be upgraded down the lane. Hence, all the details concerning connecting with the database should be changed. This should be tracked continuously.Audit the configuration of the systems to ensure that they are compliant with the regulations and validations.Let us now see how one can practically implement such complex automation for their Environments and Configuration?Codifying Environment and Configuration ManagementAll the configuration parameters can be compiled into a file, like a properties file, for example, that can automatically build and configure an environment. Thus, proper configuration management in DevOps can give birth to:Infrastructure-as-a-code (IaaC): An infrastructure can be anything, from load balancers to databases. IaaC allows developers to build, edit and distribute the environment (as containers in an extension), ensuring the proper working state of the infrastructure, is ready for development and testing. Below is a sample code to configure an AWS EC2 instance:2. Configuration-as-a-code (CaaC): Configure the infrastructure and its environment can now be put into a file and managed in a repository. For example, the Configuration as Code plugin in Jenkins allows configuring the required configurations of any infrastructure in a YAML file.At the basic level, the different servers for the different environments for testing and development can hold different properties files that can be appropriately picked up by the Jenkins pipeline and deployed accordingly.Talking about these automating techniques begs the next question: “Are these automated?” Of course, yes. The market provides many tools that can automate environment and configuration management like:Ansible automates infrastructure configuration, deployment, and cloud provisioning with the IaaC model, using playbooks. A playbook is a YAML file with the steps of the configuration and deployment which is executed with the Ansible execution engine.Puppet can be used to configure, deploy, and run servers and automate the deployment of the applications, along with remediating operation and security risks.CFEngine helps in provisioning and managing software deployment, mainly heavy computer systems, embedded systems.ConclusionThe digital environment and the complex configurations are both equally essential for a healthy and productive DevOps pipeline. Especially when it comes to testing, both these aspects hold the potential to drastically choke up or relieve the bandwidths for the testing teams. Having a way to automate the Environment and Configuration Management is not just time saving but a highly encouraging step towards the modernization of DevOps automation that the digital world needs today.

Aziro Marketing

Configuration Management devops devops automation

3 Major Requirements For Synergizing DevOps Automation Services and Low-Code

Flexible load-balancing, multi-layer security, impeccable data operations, or multi-point monitoring – DevOps automation has made all this possible. The software deliveries have accelerated, and legacy systems have grown to be more automation-friendly thanks to CI/CD. What organizations are now becoming increasingly interested in is the benefits of Low-code solutions. Been amongst the buzzwords for quite some time now, Low-code is now finding its way into mainstream software development and digital business processes. One might thank the recent disruption caused in the last two years for this, or maybe just the way things are accelerated in the digital world. Either way, Low-code, and DevOps seems like a partnership everyone can benefit from. While DevOps automation services have already found their ground in the digital transformation landscape, the appeal for low-code majorly lies in its scope for complex innovations with faster results. Such space is essential for the contemporary customer needs and modernization of complex business processes. No wonder Gartner too predicted in their recent report for the low-code to almost triple in its utilities. Therefore, it is essential to understand how ready our DevOps machinery is for Low-code, especially in terms of three major concerns in today’s digital ecosystem: Scalability Data Management and Security We will go through these concerns one by one and discuss the current status in DevOps pipelines and the need for Low-code implementation. 1. Scalable Infrastructure for High-Performing Low-Code Although low-code platforms are there to encourage scalable workload scalability, the complexity in the variable workloads for different industrial and business-specific needs might attract unnecessary manual intervention throughout the application development and delivery pipelines. Integrating the low-code platforms with the specialized DevOps pipelines would require architectural support to streamline the operations and accelerate the deployments. Such cutting-edge infrastructure is not completely absent in modern-day DevOps, but one needs the right expertise to explore and exploit it. The key ingredient that would bring the right flavor for low-code solutions would be the configuration management automation that DevOps services now offer. Tools like Chef, Openstack, Google Compute Engine, etc. can provide the architectural and configurational support that the DevOps teams would require to work with Low-code platforms. Once the required configuration management for provisioning, discovery, and governance are in place, DevOps pipelines and Low-code solutions can easily achieve the scalability standards required for the globally spread services and complex customer demands. 2. Smart Storage for Easy Low-Code Data Management Productive Low-code automation would require efficient data management for customized workloads and role-based operations. This requires a robust storage infrastructure with required accessibility and analytics features that would work well with the low-code platforms. DevOps pipelines have already evolved to work with technologies like Software-Defined Storage, cloud storage, and container storage for such data management requirements. Moreover, tools like Dockers, Kubernetes, and AWS resources are also now offerings support for better storage integration and management whether remote or on-premise as per the business needs. With the required scalability and data management capabilities already in place, the only major concern that can make or break the deal for Low-code is Security. 3. Secure Operations for the Low-Code Tools SaaS and PaaS solutions are already joining hands with low-code tools and technologies. DevOps teams are keenly working with pre-built templates that can be easily customized for scalability and data management needs. However, the security aspect of the Low-Code and DevOps engagement is still fuelling the skepticism around it. Integrating external tools and APIs with the existing DevOps pipelines may go either way as far as security is concerned. Vulnerabilities in monitoring, network management, and data transactions can be cruelly exploited by cyberattackers as we saw in many security incidents across the globe last year. So, what remedies are available in existing DevOps that can encourage more business leaders to adapt and explore the benefits of Low-code with DevOps automation services. The answer lies in a rather popular DevOps specialization known as DevSecOps. DevSecOps has the in-built CI/CD security and features like shift-left and continuous testing that offer the required attack protection and threat intelligence. There are tools for interactive security testing, cloud security assessment, secret management, and secure infrastructure as code. Expertise in tools like Veracode, Dockscan, and HashiCorp Vault can offer the security assurance one would need to introduce low-code capabilities in their DevOps ecosystem. Moreover, the latest OAuth/2 models, TLS1.2 protocols, and HMAC standards are also there to provide an external security layer. Conclusion Products and offerings across the global industries have now aligned themselves for the vast benefits of digital innovation. Low-code is a fairly new player in this game where DevOps already happens to be a fan favorite. With customer demands getting more nuanced, focusing on low-code will offer the required time and space for futuristic innovations. With the above-mentioned concerns properly addressed, Low-code solutions can easily work in synergy with DevOps and provide the business leaders the modern-day digital transformation that their business needs.

Aziro Marketing

devops devops automation Low-Code

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