Platform engineering is the rising star of the operations firmament. However squint laborious and you will rapidly see that the muse of any critical platform engineering program is operational and utility safety. By designing a platform by way of a “security-first” lens, platform engineering leaders can arrange their DevOps and AppDev groups for achievement and make them extra environment friendly by minimizing the toil and cognitive load required to correctly execute safety insurance policies and practices.
Designing Platform Belongings From “Least Privilege”: A Lockdown Mindset
Each part inside your platform — be it a digital machine, a container, or perhaps a service account — ought to function with the naked minimal variety of permissions. That is native to safety and safe by design, nevertheless it also needs to be a core a part of platform design, too. This limits the blast radius if an attacker does compromise part of your system. Platform engineering groups ought to design their instruments and companies for utility builders and DevOps practitioners accordingly. Doing this nicely requires consideration to element and a deep understanding of developer workflows. It additionally implies that platform designs ought to, if doable, accommodate just-in-time entry that elevates permissions solely when vital and revokes them after the required motion. Sounds laborious, however all the things is transferring quicker in utility improvement, so permissioning methods ought to meet the problem, too. This implies preserving builders of their workflows and ensuring they get what they want after they want it, whereas additionally sustaining correct safety.
Safe Defaults in Configuration Administration: No Room for Sloppiness
When your infrastructure is outlined as code (IaC), the default settings for vital parts (load balancers, database entry, API gateways) develop into the muse of your safety posture. Builders wish to spend as little time as doable on configurations. But a surprisingly excessive share of safety incidents are attributed to misconfigurations of safety controls or entry insurance policies. Configuration administration is not horny, however platform engineering for safety means placing actual muscle-building default configs and scanning behind it to make sure these configs are enforced in testing and deployment. Carefully associated to safety configuration administration is hardening IaC templates (Terraform, CloudFormation, and so on.). These templates outline your infrastructure deployments. Attackers know this and are paying an increasing number of consideration to IaC as an avenue of assault. Common safety critiques and IaC scanning will help uncover potential weaknesses. For his or her half, builders simply wish to seize a template and run with it. Inline ideas the place builders deploy infrastructure have gotten important. New AI methods are significantly useful in analyzing configurations and suggesting modifications to harden or enhance them.
Automated Safety Testing in CI/CD Pipelines: Fail Quick, Fail Protected
Platform engineering should combine safety checks instantly into your steady integration and steady supply (CI/CD) pipelines so that they run robotically every time builders take a look at code (and sometimes earlier than it’s pushed to the principle department). This spots vulnerabilities early within the improvement cycle. Operating static utility safety testing (SAST) and software program composition evaluation (SCA) to detect code vulnerabilities and dangerous open supply parts is the naked minimal.
Extra complete practices entail container picture scanning for recognized vulnerabilities and IaC scanning for misconfigurations. Higher but, deploying runtime scanners can detect issues that may seem solely when processes are working. Correctly carried out, safety automation will increase coverage enforcement and reduces human error. Nevertheless, heavy-handed automation can develop into problematic. For instance, implementing broad, automated code scanning of a whole utility earlier than each commit could lead to scanners calling out recognized however irrelevant points and slowing down CI/CD pipelines for no good motive. Scanning must be built-in with the developer expertise utilizing in-line tooling and scanners that by no means transfer the dev out of their consolation zone. Scanning may give attention to code that modifications to scale back alert fatigue.
GitOps for Model and Management
Adopting GitOps for managing infrastructure and container pictures will help platform engineering higher handle fast-changing configurations and create extra clear and accountable infrastructure engineering. Model management, deployment of configurations as code, and the usage of a central repository are easy paths to enhancing utility and infrastructure safety by eradicating human errors, streamlining workflows, and eliminating unfamiliar extra IT orchestration methods. SecOps groups may even share Git entry to GitOps workflows so that in a safety incident everyone seems to be in the identical repo and in a position to root-cause collectively. For builders and DevOps, GitOps feels extra native than attempting to be taught new environments like Ansible or different IT deployment and configuration engines.
Conclusion: Platform Safety is Job No. 1
These are simply among the methods good platform engineering can really increase safety whereas nonetheless enhancing developer expertise, code velocity, and DevOps efficiency. Any assumption that enhancing platform safety will essentially decelerate and hinder utility improvement is a false trade-off. In truth, the 2 could be extremely complementary, and platform engineers are in all probability higher suited to delivering safety whereas enhancing developer expertise than safety engineers themselves. For contemporary functions constructed on Kubernetes and microservices, platform engineering is not only about constructing useful methods but in addition about embedding safety into the material of these methods, making it an integral a part of safety engineering.