Adopting and implementing DevOps capabilities in an organization is difficult due to the complexities and challenges associated with integrating development and operations practices into a unified framework. The challenges vary by organization and team but tend to involve issues like moving from legacy applications to microservices, adoption and integration of new tools, securely managing code and infrastructure in multiple environments and dealing with DevOps exhaustion from constantly fighting fires in code and infrastructure.
In this two-part article series, we explore the historical context that led to the emergence of DevOps, the challenges organizations face in adopting and implementing DevOps, and how aligning code, infrastructure, application, and cloud architecture is crucial to achieving CISA secure by design goals. In Part Two, we will provide an overview of serverless services that should be considered essential tools for developers, DevOps, security, and cloud architects.
DevOps developed as a response to the traditional siloed approach to software development and IT operations. In the past, development teams were focused on writing code and delivering features, and operations teams were responsible for deploying and maintaining the applications. This led to communication gaps, delayed releases, and an overall lack of collaboration between the two teams. As application development grew, the need for continuous delivery and faster release cycles was apparent. However, the disconnect between development and operations slowed this evolution. DevOps was the way to bridge this gap, promoting a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices.
While the benefits of DevOps were widely recognized, organizations encountered challenges in its adoption.
One of the biggest challenges was the cultural shift required for DevOps, as it needed to dismantle silos and foster collaboration among development, operations, and SaaS security teams. Further, we also discovered that the culture gaps included a skills and tooling gap. DevOps required a combination of skills from development, operations, and security domains, which were hard to find in those days. Along with the skills gap, there were disparate tools for the formerly siloed personas. Because DevOps integrates various technology domains, it also uses tools that were designed for a specific domain. Over time, this has evolved, so that today there are many integrated technologies on the market that automate processes, manage infrastructure as code (IaC), and support operations and continuous delivery, but selecting the right tools and ensuring they work together is complex and time-consuming.
One of the bigger challenges that got the attention of organizational risk managers was effective security integration. Incorporating SaaS security into the DevOps pipeline puts us in the DevSecOps category, but it is important to mention that security practices should be included in the integration of every stage of the development, deployment and operations lifecycle – without slowing down the delivery process. This balance requires planning, negotiating processes, SLA, and the right set of tools to do the job.
CISA’s Secure by Design goals are helpful because they emphasize the importance of building SaaS security into products and systems from the start, rather than treating it as an afterthought. DevOps, when implemented correctly, aligns well with these principles. For example, Secure by Design DevOps encourages a shift-left approach to security, wherein security is considered before development starts. This includes how you architect and implement automated security testing in CI/CD pipelines, conducting regular security assessments. Automated security testing and CI/CD leads to continuous monitoring, where organizations can detect and respond to availability and security threats in real-time. The shift-left approach, in conjunction with continuous monitoring, can also simplify automated compliance and verify whether the compliance controls deployed actually protect against or detect the risk you want to mitigate by the control. This helps provide visibility into the compliance testing and CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that applications meet security and regulatory requirements before they are deployed.
Architecture and Secure by Design
NXT1 believes that prioritizing architecture is central to achieving Secure by Design goals because it aligns business outcomes with technology decisions. Architecture is not just about how components connect in a diagram, but also how services are deployed, operated, secured, and maintained during outages or cyber-attacks. Effective architecture integrates cross-functional perspectives like business, technology, development, resiliency and security, before any code is written or infrastructure designed. Prioritizing architecture fosters a risk-based approach where teams can make informed technical tradeoffs that maximize resilience, performance, and security while minimizing risk. For example, by adopting a cloud-native microservices architecture aligned with zero-trust security principles, an organization can improve application scalability and resilience while reducing its attack surface, improving overall security and operational efficiency.
CISA’s Secure by Design principles are instrumental in overcoming some key DevOps challenges because it targets both technology and business leadership. To achieve the Secure by Design principles, organizations must align code, infrastructure, application, and cloud architecture within the DevOps framework so that SaaS security, scalability, and reliability are built into the development process from the ground up. This means writing application code with security and scalability in mind, following secure coding practices, using version control systems that automate code analysis to detect vulnerabilities early in the development process. It also means that infrastructure as code is the baseline to streamline secure, machine-readable DevOps processes that improve over time.
Infrastructure as code is an important architectural design element because it is both machine and human readable, repeatable, scalable, traceable, and can be easily automated to provide rapid response playbooks in the event of service outages or cyber-attacks.
For traditional applications, the application and infrastructure architecture are two separate, but dependent aspects of application design. This is because the application resides, executes, and is limited by the server infrastructure that contains it. This is true for virtual machines and containers hosted on-premises because they are constrained by the number of servers in the VM or container cluster. The cloud removes some of those constraints by dynamically adding more infrastructure supporting an app running in virtual machines or containers.
However, the serverless cloud redefines the relationship between infrastructure and code. In the serverless cloud infrastructure and code should be viewed as an integrated unit. When well executed, the application code will continually interact with cloud infrastructure as code that plugs into the cloud provider’s distributed systems management services to remove many limitations of apps running in virtual machines or containers hosted on hardware. This is done using APIs to pass requests and parameters between cloud infrastructure services and app code to perform desired application functions. Cloud architecture provides the flexible and scalable resources required to do the work of the application.
By integrating cloud-native services, you can simplify code, reduce the lines you need to manage, test, and secure—allowing more focus on delivering customer value.
Evaluating serverless technologies from the architectural perspective provides a wealth of insights on this topic. NXT1 believes serverless has become an essential component of modern cloud architecture, offering a way to build and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure, reducing operational and compliance overhead and transferring a substantial amount of organization risk off your books and to the cloud provider.
About NXT1 LaunchIT
NXT1 LaunchIT is the developer’s platform to build and operate secure SaaS, enabling instant availability by automating cloud infrastructure management – simply code and deploy. With government-level security, comprehensive operational controls, and integrated ecommerce, LaunchIT accelerates time to revenue and reduces costs for technology startups, legacy application migrations, and more. Get started with a 14-day free trial at nxt1.cloud/free-trial.
