Learn how threat modeling in DevSecOps mitigates cyber threats, enhances security, and integrates seamlessly into the software development lifecycle.
Threat Modeling for DevSecOps: Enhancing Security from the Ground Up Read More »
DevSecOps
Migrating to GitHub may seem daunting, but the advantages are substantial. Here are 6 reasons to consider a GitHub migration.
Modernise Your Development: The Benefits of a GitHub Migration Read More »
DevSecOps
We are one of the few Australian Microsoft partners that has achieved the DevOps with GitHub on Microsoft Azure Specialisation!
TL Consulting Receives Specialisation For DevOps Using GitHub! Read More »
DevSecOps, News
Explore why migrating CI/CD from Azure DevOps to GitHub Actions enhances DevOps with better security, AI integration, and community support.
Should You Use Azure DevOps Or GitHub Actions For CI/CD? Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Optimise software development with Azure DevTest Labs. Discover how its automated policies, CI/CD integrations, and customisable templates can help you.
Azure DevTest Labs: The Key to Faster Software Development Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Navigating the Future of Software Development The world of software development is rapidly changing. To stay competitive, organisations need to not only keep up with the changes but also strategically adopt methods that improve agility, security, and dependability. The emergence of cloud computing, microservices, and containers has given rise to an innovative approach to creating and deploying software in a cloud-native way. Cloud-native applications are designed to be scalable, resilient, and secure, and they are often delivered through DevOps or DevSecOps methodologies. The markets for cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps are all witnessing substantial growth, fuelled by the growing demand for streamlined software development practices and heightened security protocols. This article will explore how the intersection of cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps is reshaping the landscape of software development. Cloud Native Development: Building for the Future Cloud-native development represents a significant transformation in the approach to designing and deploying software. It revolves around crafting applications specifically tailored for cloud environments. These applications are usually constructed from microservices, which are compact, self-contained units collaborating to provide the application’s features. This architectural approach endows cloud-native applications with superior scalability and resilience when compared to conventional monolithic applications. Key Benefits of Cloud Native Development: Platform Engineering: The Glue that Holds It Together Platform engineering is the bridge between development and operations. It is about providing the tools and infrastructure that developers need to build, test, and deploy their applications seamlessly. Think of it as an internal developer platform, offering a standardised environment for building and running software. Why Platform Engineering Matters: DevSecOps: Weaving Security into the Fabric DevSecOps extends the DevOps philosophy by emphasising the integration of security into every phase of the software development lifecycle. It shifts security from being an afterthought to an initiative-taking and continuous process. The Importance of DevSecOps: Embarking on the Cloud Native, Platform Engineering, and DevSecOps Odyssey While there exist various avenues for implementing cloud-native, platform engineering, and DevSecOps practices, the optimal approach hinges on an organisation’s unique requirements. Nevertheless, some overarching steps that organisations can consider include: In summation, cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps are not mere buzzwords; they are strategic mandates for organisations aiming to flourish in the digital era. These practices pave the way for heightened agility, cost-effectiveness, security, and reliability in software development. Conclusion: As market intelligence attests, the adoption of these practices is not decelerating; it is gaining momentum. Organisations that wholeheartedly embrace cloud-native development, invest in platform engineering, and prioritise DevSecOps will be ideally positioned to navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities of tomorrow. The moment to embark on this transformative journey is now, ensuring that your software development processes are not just future-ready but also primed to deliver value at an unprecedented velocity and with unwavering security.
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Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Measuring DevSecOps Success: Metrics that Matter In today’s fast-paced digital world, security threats are constantly evolving, and organisations are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. According to a recent Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM, the average total cost of a data breach reached a record high of $4.35 million, with the average time to identify and contain a data breach taking 287 days. To mitigate these risks, enterprises are turning to DevSecOps, an approach that integrates security into the software development process. However, just adopting DevSecOps is not enough. Organisations must continually evaluate the effectiveness of their DevSecOps practices to ensure that they are adequately protecting their systems and data. As more businesses embrace DevSecOps, measuring DevSecOps success has become a critical component of security strategy. DevSecOps KPIs enable you to monitor and assess the advancement and effectiveness of DevSecOps practices within your software development pipeline, offering comprehensive insights into the determinants that impact success. These critical indicators facilitate the evaluation and measurement of collaborative workflows by development, security, and operations teams. By utilising these metrics, you can monitor the progress of your business objectives, such as expedited software-delivery lifecycles, enhanced security, and improved quality. Moreover, these key metrics furnish vital data for transparency and control throughout the development pipeline, facilitating the streamlining of development and enhancement of software security and infrastructure. Additionally, you can identify software defects and track the average time required to rectify those flaws. Number of Security Incidents One critical metric to track is the number of security incidents. Tracking the number of security incidents can help organisations identify the most common types of incidents and assess the frequency of incidents. By doing so, they can prioritise their efforts to address the most common issues and improve their overall security posture. Organisations can track the number of security incidents through various tools such as security incident and event management (SIEM) systems or logging and monitoring tools. By analysing the data from these tools, one can identify patterns and trends in the types of security incidents occurring and use this information to prioritise their security efforts. For instance, if an organisation finds that phishing attacks are the most common type of security incident, they can focus on training employees to be more vigilant against phishing attempts. Time to Remediate Security Issues Another essential metric to track is the time it takes to remediate security issues. This metric can help organisations identify bottlenecks in their security processes and improve their incident response time. By reducing the time, it takes to remediate security issues, organisations can minimise the impact of security incidents and ensure that their products remain secure. This metric can be tracked by setting up a process to monitor security vulnerabilities and track the time it takes to fix them. This process can include automated vulnerability scanning and testing tools, as well as manual code reviews and penetration testing. By tracking the time it takes to remediate security issues, organisations can identify areas where their security processes may be slowing down and work to improve those processes. Code Quality Metrics Code quality is another important aspect of DevSecOps, and tracking code quality metrics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of DevSecOps practices. Code quality metrics such as code complexity, maintainability, and test coverage can be tracked using code analysis tools such as SonarQube or CheckMarx. These tools can provide insights into the quality of the code being produced and identify areas where improvements can be made. For example, if a business finds that their code has high complexity, they can work to simplify the code to make it more maintainable and easier to secure. Compliance Metrics Compliance is another essential aspect of security, and measuring compliance metrics can help organisations ensure that they are meeting the necessary regulatory and industry standards. Tracking compliance metrics such as the number of compliance violations and the time to remediate them can help organisations identify compliance gaps and address them. Additionally, to ensure security, monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and vulnerability fixes are regularly conducted on all workstations and servers. Compliance metrics such as the number of compliance violations can be tracked through regular compliance audits and assessments. By monitoring compliance metrics, organisations can identify areas where they may be falling short of regulatory or industry standards and work to address those gaps. User Satisfaction Finally, tracking user satisfaction is an essential metric to ensure that security is not hindering user experience and that security is not compromising the overall quality of the product. Measuring user satisfaction can help organisations ensure that their security practices are not negatively impacting their users’ experience and that they are delivering a high-quality product. User satisfaction can be measured through surveys or feedback mechanisms built into software applications. By gathering feedback from users, businesses can identify areas where security may be impacting the user experience and work to improve those areas. For example, if users are finding security measures such as multi-factor authentication too cumbersome, organisations can look for ways to streamline the process while still maintaining security. In conclusion, measuring DevSecOps success is crucial for organisations that want to ensure that their software products remain secure. By tracking relevant metrics such as the number of security incidents, time to remediate security issues, code quality, compliance, and user satisfaction, organisations can evaluate the effectiveness of their DevSecOps practices continually. Measuring DevSecOps success can help organisations identify areas that need improvement, prioritise security-related tasks, and make informed decisions about resource allocation. To read more on DevSecOps security and compliance, please visit our DevSecOps services page.
Measuring DevSecOps Success Metrics that Matter Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Top Cloud Plays in 2023: Unlocking Innovation and Agility Cloud Computing has been around since the early 2000’s, while the technology landscape continues to evolve rapidly and adoption increased (20% CAGR), offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation and digital transformation. The meaning of digital transformation is also changing with cloud decision makers viewing Digital transformation as more than a “lift and shift”, instead they see vast opportunity within the Cloud ecosystems to help reinforce their long-term success. As businesses increasingly embrace cloud, certain cloud plays have emerged as key drivers of success, underpinned by companies including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and VMWare who have all developed very strong technology ecosystems that have transitioned from a manual and costly Data Centre model. In this blog, we will explore the top cloud plays, from our perspective, that organisations should consider unlocking to reach their full potential in 2023. Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies: Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies have gained significant traction in 2023. Organisations are leveraging multiple cloud providers and combining public and private cloud environments to achieve greater flexibility, scalability, and resilience through their investment. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches allow businesses to choose the best services from different providers while maintaining control over critical data and applications. This strategy helps mitigate vendor lock-in leveraging Kubernetes Container orchestration, including AKS, EKS & GKE and VMWare Tanzu, optimise costs, and tailor cloud deployments to specific business requirements and use cases. Cloud-Native Application Development Cloud-Native Application Development: Cloud-native application development is a transformative cloud play that enables organisations to build and deploy applications, through optimised DevSecOps practices, specifically designed for advanced cloud environments. This model leverages containerization, CICD, microservices architecture, and orchestration platforms again emphasising Kubernetes, a strong Cloud Native foundational play. Cloud-native applications are designed to be highly scalable, resilient, and agile, allowing organisations to rapidly adapt to changing business needs. By embracing cloud-native development, businesses can accelerate time-to-market, improve scalability, and enhance developer productivity embedding strong Developer Experience (DevEx) practices. Serverless Computing Serverless computing: is a game-changer for businesses seeking to build applications without worrying about server management. With serverless computing, developers can focus solely on writing code while the cloud provider handles infrastructure provisioning and scaling. An example of this is Microsoft Azure Serverless Platform or AWS Lambda. This cloud play offers automatic scaling, cost optimisation, and event-driven architectures, allowing businesses to build highly scalable and cost-effective applications. Serverless computing simplifies development efforts, reduces operational overhead, and enables companies to quickly respond to changing application workloads. Cloud Security and Compliance Cloud security and compliance: are critical cloud plays that organisations cannot afford to overlook in 2023 particularly with recent data breaches at Optus and Medicare. Leveraging security as a foundational element of your cloud native journey is crucial for ensuring the protection, integrity, and compliance of your applications and data. Cloud providers offer robust security frameworks, encryption services, identity and access management solutions, and compliance certifications. By leveraging these cloud security products and practices, businesses can enhance their data protection, safeguard customer information, and ensure regulatory compliance. Strong security and compliance measures build trust, mitigate risks, and protect organisations from potential data breaches. Data Analytics and Machine Learning: Data analytics and machine learning (ML) are powerful cloud plays that drive data-driven decision-making and unlock actionable insights. Cloud providers offer advanced analytics and ML services that enable businesses to leverage their data effectively. By harnessing cloud-based data analytics and ML capabilities, businesses can gain valuable insights, predict trends, automate processes, and enhance customer experiences. These cloud plays empower organisations to extract value from their data, optimize operations, and drive innovation while providing an enhanced customer experience. As the evolution of Cloud Native, Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies accelerate, strategically adopting the above drivers help enable innovation, agility, and business growth. Importantly Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies provide enhanced security, flexibility, while cloud-native application development empowers rapid application deployment and better developer experience (DevEx), leveraging DevSecOps and Automation practices. These are critical initiatives to consider, if you are looking to advance your technology ecosystem and migrate and/or port workloads for optimum flexibility and Return on Investment (ROI). It is evident the traditional “lift and shift strategy” does not provide this level of value to the consumer. Instead, the above “on-demand cloud plays” may not be realised, with inefficient cloud resource management and unexpected expenses, leading to increased OPEX and TCO. By embracing these top cloud plays, it enables businesses investing in innovation to develop and deploy applications that can scale seamlessly on Cloud, adapting to changing customer demands, reduce TCO/ OPEX, accelerate time-to-market, maintain high availability and security, while future proofing themselves in this competitive digital landscape. For more information about Cloud, Cloud-Native, Data Analytics and more, visit our services page.
Top Cloud Plays in 2023: Unlocking Innovation and Agility Read More »
Cloud-Native, Data & AI, DevSecOps
Unlocking The Potential of Tanzu Application Platform (TAP – a Multicloud, Portable Kubernetes PaaS) Cloud-native application architecture targets building and running software applications that triumph the flexibility, scalability, and resilience of cloud computing by following the 12 factors, microservices architecture with self-service agile infrastructure offering an API based collaborative and self-healing system. Cloud-native encompasses the various tools and techniques used by software developers today to build applications for the public cloud. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration to build the Cloud Native applications. Undoubtedly Kubernetes is changing the way enterprises manages their infrastructure and application deployments. However, at the core, there is still a clean separation of concerns between the developers and operators. Now comes the new VMWare’s Tanzu Application Platform under the Tanzu Portfolio to address some of the fundamental issues with the developer and operations collaboration issues and provides an effortless path to application deployments in a secure, module, scalable in a portable Kubernetes environment. What is Tanzu Application Platform (TAP)? “A superior multi-cloud developer experience on Kubernetes VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a prepared path to production to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.” By VMWare Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows in both the inner loop and outer loop of cloud-native application development and deployments on Kubernetes. A typical inner loop consists of developers writing the code in their local IDE (Integrated development environment), testing, and debugging the application, push and pull the code from a soured code repository, deploying to a development or staging environment, and then making additional code changes based on the continuous feedback. An outer loop consists of the steps to deploy the application to a non-production /production environment and support them over time. In the instance of a cloud-native platform, the outer loop includes activities such as building container images, adding container security, i.e., vulnerability scanning, trust and adding signature and configuring continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. TAP creates an abstraction layer above the underlying Kubernetes, focusing on portability and reproducibility, avoiding lock-in where possible. Underneath, TAP provides strong support with all the tools required for the build and deployment of the applications in the form of Accelerators and Supply chains Choreographers. TAP can be installed and managed on most of the managed Kubernetes instances like AKS(Azure), EKS(AWS) and GKE (Google Cloud) available in the market as well as any other unmanaged conformant Kubernetes cluster. Developers can even install it on their local Minikube instance as well. TAP also supports an out of the box workflow for DevSecOps based on the best open-source tools. However, there is strong support to customise these workflows with the enterprise-grade/commercial tools of choice. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services page.
Unlocking The Potential of Tanzu Application Platform Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps, Uncategorised
“Shift Left” Application Security in Kubernetes with Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) To secure a Kubernetes environment, we must adopt the “shift left” security approach right from the initial phases of the development, rather than wait for the deployment to complete and focus on the security at later stages of the build. Kubernetes security is constantly evolving with new features to strengthen both the application and cluster security. Kubernetes offers several mechanisms to administer security within the cluster. Some of these include enforcing resource limits, API security, standardizing containers, auditing and so on. Here we will discuss one of such mechanism, which helps to implement the shift left security in a Kubernetes cluster. What is OPA? Open Policy Agent (OPA) is an open-source policy engine that provides a way of manifesting the policies declaratively as code, which helps to ease out some of the decision-making processes with the Kubernetes cluster end users, such as developers, operations teams without impacting the agility of the development. OPA uses a policy language called Rego, which allows you to write policies as code for various services like Kubernetes, CI/CD, Chef, and Terraform using the same language. OPA enforces the separation of concern by decoupling the decision-making from the core business logic of the applications. OPA Workflow: OPA provides centralized policy management and generates policy decisions by evaluating the input data against policies (written in Rego) and data (in JSON) through RESTful APIs. Here we have some of the example policies we can enforce using OPA: Which users can access which resources? Which subnets egress traffic is allowed to? Include node and pod (anti-), affinity selectors, on Deployments Which clusters a workload must be deployed to? Ensure all the images come from a trusted registry Which OS capabilities a container can execute with. Implementing Kubernetes Admission Controllers to validate API requests. Allowing or denying Terraform changes based on compliance or safety rules. Enforcing certain deployment policies (such as resource limits, meta data types of resources) Creating Custom Policies using OPA in Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) VMware Tanzu Mission Control is a centralized hub for simplified, multi-cloud, multi-cluster Kubernetes management. Tanzu Mission Control aims to help with the following list of Kubernetes operations: Managing clusters on both public, private cloud and edge Cluster lifecycle management on supported providers Manage security across multiple clusters Centralized policy management Access management Cluster conformance VMware Tanzu Mission Control provides centralized policy management for specific policies that you can use to govern your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, The polices include access controls, image registry policies, and resource limit policies. While these cover the baseline polices, it also offers an ability to create custom policies using Open Policy Agent (OPA). Custom policies are somewhat open-ended and provide the opportunity to address aspects of cluster management that specifically suit the needs of your organization. As described above OPA implement specialized policies that enforce and govern your Kubernetes clusters. Closing thoughts: Enterprises use the OPA to enforce, govern, audit, and remediate policies across all IT environments. You can use OPA to centralize operational, security, and compliance aspects of Kubernetes, in the context of cloud-native deployments, (CI/CD) pipelines, auditing and data protection. Thus, OPA enables DevOps teams to shift control over application authorization further left to advance the adoption of best DevSecOps practices. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services page.
