Today, cybersecurity implementation in shipping processes, applications, infrastructures, or any other organization related activity is necessary. Security is the only aspect that has a huge impact on the whole organization at a different intensity level. That’s where DevSecOps comes into the picture, which involves security as a code concept into the application development cycle with many other aspects.
DevSecOps is the upgraded version of DevOps, which provides the advantages of DevOps, such as agility and responsiveness by integrating additional security modules into the development cycle. Its main goal is to deliver security-related decisions at speed and scale them to the highest priority development areas. In short, it adds security as a shared responsibility at the beginning level and continues it throughout the project development lifecycle until the application is deployed on the particular public platform.
However, DevSecOps’s ability will reach its limitation at some point, especially in the case of cloud-native application development. But there is nothing to worry about because GitOps was already invented to bridge this limitation.
What is GitOps?
GitOps is an operating model that delivers and manages cloud-native applications to the Kubernetes. We can also say this as an upgraded version of DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE best practices for the systems deployed on Kubernetes. Today, Gitops is being utilized as continuous integration and delivery best practices for various technological platforms, including Terraform, Chef, Nomad, Ansible, etc.
GitOps indeed boosts developers’ velocity alongside products’ security in various ways throughout the development cycle:
- It provides centralized configuration for the applications in a declarative way.
- It automates almost all processes in terms of configuration as a code and guarantees zero manual actions across the ecosystem.
- Uses VCS features to make potential changes as much as possible.
- Provides better monitoring across the system because it uses significant metrics through different processes to operate.
DevOps provides continuous integration and delivery process, whereas GitOps equips proactive security for each iteration to discover even tiny errors and issues and eliminate them as early as possible before the final product is deployed on any platform. Well, GitOps is not that precise solution, which solves every bug. In simple terms, it does contain some limitations.
As a new platform or best practice adopted by the organization gets extra care and importance. Similarly, it needs specific attention while permitting it to fetch sensitive data.
Sensitive Data Management:
When it comes to keeping sensitive data secure in git repositories, it may not be the right choice because it distributes the data across multiple places, which means losing privacy control on them. GitOps requires data confidentiality management at each step of the workflow, which is a bit complicated process.
There was a time when GitOps alternatives were only used to maintain the confidentiality of selected types of sensitive data but now provide management for all kinds of crucial information.
Here are the reasons why GitOps is the best choice to manage sensitive data confidentiality:
- Revises the security policy continuously
- Ensures all recent changes and upcoming data are backed up and remain intact in all possible worst situations.
- Keeps data access secret and limited
- Manages the sensitive data and source code in the same and uniform way
A few reasons why GitOps is the right solution but a complicated one for this task, and here are its depending factors:
- Solution installation and management processes are complex.
- Requires maturity of services, especially for cloud-based services.
- The workflow is necessary to provide necessary features.
- High-security aspect to fulfil the compliance needs.
GitOps supports various security tools, including HashiCorp Vault, Secret Operations, Fluxv2, ArgoCD, Kamus, Bitnami, and many others, but the HashiCorp Vault is a more secure and widely used solution.
Secures Entire Development Pipeline:
GitOps improves the security of many developments’ pipeline objects through the code, which means it integrates security measures and configurations within the code to the process, where all changes are made. After the completion of all changes, it allows developers to roll back to the specific point to review the process if needed. GitOps contains a built-in auditing process, which keeps track of each alteration with time so developers can revisit their logic for future references.
GitOps provides security level-related information through a single set of tests, security scans, and permissions to develop, which is a big security advantage. In case of a live system attack, developers can immediately turn on the redeploy security process quickly as it provides a single source of security management control.
Conclusion:
Many organizations are still using push-based development platforms, but now if they want to win the trust of their customers, they should embrace GitOps for their infrastructure. GitOps is significantly changing the culture of product development and other services. It can provide many benefits to the organizations, but they should keep some patience because it might take some time to reflect.
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