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Category: DevOps in the Cloud

How Automation Enables Remote Work

In recent years, the world has witnessed a significant shift towards remote working, largely driven by global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This transformation has necessitated the adoption of new tools and strategies, with automation emerging as a key enabler of effective remote work.

So, what does automation mean in this context? Well, it’s the use of technology to carry out tasks with minimal human intervention. It’s a powerful tool that can streamline processes, boost efficiency and cut down on errors, making it an invaluable resource for companies navigating the complexities of remote work.

The Rise of Remote Work

According to McKinsey, a whopping 58% of Americans now have the opportunity to work from home (WFH) at least one day per week. And 35% have the opportunity to WFH for the totality of their work responsibilities.

This shift has brought numerous benefits to both employers and employees. For employees, it means more flexibility, less commuting and a better work-life balance. For employers, it broadens the talent pool, cuts overhead costs and can even boost productivity. However, remote working also presents unique challenges, such as:

● Communication Barriers: In a remote work setup, maintaining clear and effective communication can be a challenge. Without face-to-face interactions, messages can be misunderstood or overlooked. This can lead to confusion, mistakes and a lack of cohesion within the team.

● Difficulty in Tracking Productivity: When employees are working from different locations, it can be difficult for managers to monitor their productivity. Traditional methods of tracking work, such as observing employees’ work hours, are not effective in a remote work setup.

● Maintaining Team Cohesion: Building and maintaining a strong team culture can be more challenging when employees are working remotely. Without regular in-person interactions, employees may feel isolated and disconnected from the team.

● Cybersecurity Concerns: Remote work often involves using personal devices and home networks, which may not have the same level of security as office networks. This can expose companies to increased cybersecurity risks.

The Role of Automation in Remote Working

Now, let’s delve into the ways automation plays a pivotal role in remote work.

Automation and Communication
In a remote work setup, effective communication is paramount. Automation tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams facilitate better communication by automating tasks like scheduling meetings, sending reminders and translating messages.

These tools can also automate the process of organizing and archiving conversations, making it easier to retrieve information when needed. Additionally, they can automate the process of updating team members about project changes or important announcements. These features ensure that all team members are on the same page, enhancing collaboration, reducing the chances of miscommunication and ultimately leading to a more cohesive and efficient team.

Automation and Human Resources
Automation in human resources (HR) is a game-changer in remote work settings. HR automation software can streamline recruitment, automating resume sorting, interview scheduling and follow-up emails. It can also enhance onboarding, automating welcome emails and account setups.

Performance management can be improved with automated feedback collection and goal tracking. Furthermore, e-learning platforms can automate training assignments, progress tracking and certification issuance. This ensures a consistent, efficient and effective HR process regardless of location, enhancing the remote work experience.

Automation and Project Management
Project management can be a challenge in remote teams due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. Automation tools like Asana and Trello simplify this process by automating task assignments, tracking progress and generating reports.

These tools can also automate the process of setting deadlines, sending reminders for upcoming tasks and notifying team members about changes in project plans. This allows managers to keep track of projects in real time, ensures that deadlines are met and helps in identifying potential issues early on, making project management more efficient and effective.

Automation and Employee Monitoring
Monitoring employee productivity and performance is crucial in a remote work setup. Automation tools like Time Doctor and Toggl track time spent on tasks, providing valuable insights into productivity.

These tools can automate the process of generating productivity reports, tracking breaks and even monitoring website and app usage. This data can be used to identify bottlenecks, improve processes and ultimately increase productivity. It also allows managers to provide constructive feedback and tailor their management strategies to individual employees’ work habits.

Automation and Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is a critical concern in remote work setups, which often involve multiple devices and networks. Automation plays a key role in maintaining security by detecting threats, installing updates and performing backups. Cybersecurity tools can automate the process of scanning for viruses, blocking malicious websites and encrypting data.

They can also automate the process of updating security protocols and alerting users about potential security threats. This ensures that data remains secure, protecting companies from potential security breaches and giving employees peace of mind to focus on their work.

Final Thoughts

Automation plays a crucial role in enabling effective remote work. By increasing efficiency, reducing errors and saving costs, automation not only makes remote work possible but also profitable. As the future of work continues to evolve, we should expect to see more and more of the remote working processes being handled by automation tools.

June 26, 2023
How to Empower DevSecOps in a Complex Multi-Cloud Landscape

Organizations are embracing cloud-based application delivery for speed of delivery and scale. However, the proliferation of multi-cloud systems to access and maximize the cloud’s capabilities is driving complexity in IT environments. Many organizations do not consider how multi-cloud adoption is expanding their attack surface—and the risk is growing: The 2023 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report found cloud exploitation cases grew by 95% year-over-year and cases involving threat actors targeting cloud environments were up 288% from a year prior.

The expansion of cloud infrastructure and services has increased the pressure on organizations to protect assets within their multi-cloud environments. To alleviate this burden, more businesses are turning to DevSecOps, a practice that incorporates security at an earlier point in the development life cycle. This practice of shifting left helps improve the quality and reduces risk of applications, as well as makes the delivery of these applications more efficient since any potential issues are found earlier in the development process.

DevSecOps is being adopted rapidly by organizations today to address the expanding array of threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting multi-cloud environments. However, securing the cloud can be tricky due to its dynamic nature and multi-cloud makes shift left security even more complex. For DevSecOps to truly be effective, here are three things that organizations should consider doing.

1. Strive for Complete Visibility in a Multi-Cloud Environment

It is important that DevSecOps teams have a comprehensive understanding of their multi-cloud environment. Without it, they will not be able to identify a variety of security risks including vulnerabilities, privileged credentials, misconfigurations and other threats that may leave their organization’s cloud assets vulnerable.

The best way to get full visibility across multi-cloud environments is through a cloud security posture management (CSPM) tool. With a CSPM tool, DevSecOps teams can identify misconfigurations and proactively detect threats. In addition, DevSecOps teams should also use a cloud infrastructure entitlement management tool (CIEM) to manage identities across all of their cloud infrastructure resources. The primary goal of a CIEM tool is to mitigate the risk that comes from the unintentional and unchecked granting of excessive permissions of user credentials.

2. Visibility and Compliance Do Not Guarantee Security

Organizations need to develop a comprehensive security strategy to mitigate issues within the development process. This may include implementing tools, automation and standards to enable developers to follow the desired security behavior. These approaches reduce developer friction, as well as diminish the likelihood that unsafe or default configurations will be used. Historically, DevOps teams have pushed back on integrating security since their concern is that it slows down the development lifecycle. However, DevSecOps is gaining traction in recent years because organizations are realizing integrating security sooner in the development lifecycle is more efficient than reactively patching problems as they arise.

A tool that DevSecOps teams should look to leverage is cloud workload protection (CWP) because it offers breach protection for workloads, containers and Kubernetes, while enabling them to continue to build, run and secure applications with speed and confidence.

3. Create Consistency With Security Tools

Ideally, organizations should opt for a single platform that consolidates capabilities such as CSPM, CWP and CIEM. The reason for consolidation is to eliminate security gaps from having multiple security solutions. As a result, DevSecOps teams should turn to cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) tools to create more consistency within the multi-cloud environment.

Securing multi-cloud environments can be complex. By empowering DevSecOps teams using these best practices, organizations will be able to move faster than today’s adversaries and have the agility to quickly adapt to present and future cybersecurity challenges in their multi-cloud environments.

June 23, 2023
Google Calls Microsoft Azure Anti-Competitive ¦ Gen-Z Can’t Email

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Google complains to the FTC about Microsoft market abuses, and new graduates don’t know how to office. (more…)

June 22, 2023
Harness Brings Generative AI Capabilities to DevOps Workflows

Harness today added a raft of generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform as part of a larger effort to reduce the level of manual toil that today conspires to create DevOps bottlenecks.

The added generative AI capabilities include an AI Development Assistant (AIDA), which analyzes log files and correlates error messages with known issues. It also includes the ability to use natural language to define policies for governing cloud assets and costs and an ability to automatically identify security vulnerabilities and generate code fixes.

Other generative AI capabilities that will be added to AIDA over the next three to six months include automated code reviews along with tools for creating pipelines and launching chaos engineering experiments.

Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal said these are the first of a series of generative AI capabilities that will be applied across the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) using large language models (LLMs) that the company has trained using publicly available sources. AIDA, at its core, provides a tool for creating custom prompts for launching queries against LLMs and a vector database that Harness has incorporated into its platform.

That approach means no customer data was used to create the model and none of the data used will find its way into a generative AI platform that is available to anyone, said Bansal. As a result, organizations don’t need to be concerned they light run afoul of licensing issues because proprietary code was inadvertently included in an LLM, he added.

Most of the existing generative AI capabilities that have been brought to market thus far are designed primarily to improve developer productivity, noted Bansal. Harness is now bringing the benefit of generative AI to DevOps teams that today rely on too many manual processes to manage the automations they build on behalf of application development teams, he added.

Harness is making AIDA available at no extra charge at a time when many DevOps teams will soon be evaluating the AI capabilities provided to them. Most DevOps teams are not going to want to manage workflows without being able to rely on AI to reduce toil and eliminate bottlenecks. Overall, Harness is forecasting generative AI will drive a 30% to 50% increase in DevOps productivity. In addition, Harness is forecasting there will be a 50% to 75% reduction in the time spent remediating vulnerabilities.

Bansal said that as that process occurs, Harness is betting more organizations will move to replace legacy CI/CD platform with more modern alternatives.

Previously, Harness has invested in machine learning algorithms to automate a range of DevOps tasks. Generative AI, in combination with machine learning, will transform DevOps workflows in ways that will ultimately improve both the rate at which applications can be built and their overall quality.

It’s not clear whether organizations might be willing to replace CI/CD platforms that they have been customizing for decades, but at the very least, that option is now more widely considered than ever.

June 21, 2023
Choosing the Right Software Deployment Tools
Imagine this scenario: After investing countless hours in developing your software, it is finally ready for deployment. Now, you must select the appropriate software deployment tools to guarantee a seamless release.

This article will guide you through the concept of software deployment and discuss various tools that cater to different needs—from dedicated deployment tools to comprehensive CI/CD pipeline solutions and GitOps approaches. By understanding these categories and their benefits, you’ll be well-prepared to make an informed decision on which tool is the best fit for your organization’s needs.

What is Software Deployment?

Software deployment plays a crucial role in the software development life cycle. It involves packaging, distributing and installing an application on target systems or environments, aiming to make your software accessible and usable for end-users seamlessly.

In today’s fast-paced world, companies must be able to deliver applications rapidly and reliably. A well-planned software deployment strategy ensures that new features reach users promptly while minimizing downtime and errors during updates.

What to Look For in a Software Deployment Tool

When selecting the ideal software deployment tool, consider the following factors:
- Automation: The tool should automate complex software deployments, making the deployment process faster and more efficient.
- Continuous deployment: Continuous deployment tools allow you to deploy software repeatedly, ensuring consistent deployments. Choose a tool that automates release management and integrates automated builds throughout the development process.
- Scalability: The tool should be capable of handling large-scale deployments and distributing software across multiple servers. Opt for a tool that enables applications to deploy to multiple servers simultaneously.
- Integration: The tool should integrate with version control and other third-party tools, making the deployment process seamless. Look for a tool that integrates with modern DevOps processes and connects automated builds to configuration management.
Full CI/CD Tools

Bamboo

Bamboo by Atlassian is a robust tool that integrates seamlessly with other Atlassian products, such as Jira and Bitbucket.

It offers first-class support for multiple languages and platforms while providing built-in deployment projects for smooth releases.

GitLab CI/CD

GitLab CI/CD, an integral part of GitLab, simplifies pipeline management using YAML configuration files stored within your project repository.

This approach enables easy collaboration among team members while ensuring consistent build environments across all stages of development.

Codefresh

Codefresh is a cloud-native solution designed specifically for Kubernetes deployments, It provides a modern interface to manage pipelines visually, along with advanced real-time debugging capabilities.

Dedicated Deployment Tools

Jenkins

Jenkins was originally conceived as a continuous integration (CI) tool, but many organizations use it mainly for deployment. It is an open source automation server that provides support for building and deploying software projects, as well as to schedule and run tasks at regular intervals. Learn more about Jenkins in this in-depth blog post.

Harness

Harness is an intelligent software delivery platform that simplifies deployments through automation and machine learning. Their continuous delivery-as-a-service (CDaaS) approach helps you deploy faster while minimizing risks and errors.

AWS CodeDeploy

If you’re using Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CodeDeploy might be a perfect fit for your needs. This completely managed service automates code deployments to any instance or serverless Lambda function in AWS, guaranteeing consistent results every time.

Spinnaker

An open source project backed by Netflix and Google, Spinnaker offers powerful multi-cloud continuous delivery capabilities for deploying applications at scale across various cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes clusters, etc.

GitOps Tools

Argo CD

Argo CD is a declarative, Kubernetes-native continuous delivery tool that uses Git repositories as the source of truth for application definitions. It simplifies rollbacks, provides audit trails and enforces consistency across environments.

Flux CD

Flux CD, another Kubernetes-focused option, automates deployments by monitoring your code repository for changes and applying them to your cluster accordingly. Bonus: It supports multi-tenancy and integrates with Helm charts.

Weave GitOps Core

Lastly, Weave GitOps Core offers an open source foundation for managing Kubernetes applications using the power of GitOps workflows. This versatile tool can be extended to fit various use cases while maintaining simplicity in its core functionality.

Conclusion

There are many software deployment tools available that can help automate the software delivery process, reduce errors and improve collaboration between development and operations teams. From open source tools like Jenkins to cloud-native solutions like AWS CodeDeploy, each tool has its own strengths and features that make it suitable for different use cases.

When selecting a software deployment tool, it is important to consider factors such as compatibility, automation, scalability, security, monitoring, deployment environment compatibility, integration with existing tools and support and documentation. By carefully evaluating these factors and choosing the right tool for your specific needs, you can ensure that your software deployment process is efficient, reliable and successful.

Image Source: Freepik
June 21, 2023
Developers’ Role in Protecting Privacy

We live in a world where we always expect things to happen seamlessly. Every time somebody walks into a café and signs in to the free WiFi and opens their Instagram or TikTok to stay up-to-date with trends and friends or retrieves a discount from a retailer by joining their newsletter circulation, rarely do they stop to think about how that convenience and value is derived.

Technology is the key enabler working away in the background, and developers and DevOps teams are making that happen. Underneath the slick interfaces of the apps and websites that provide these highly efficient and personalized experiences is a complex machine that relies on data to fuel it, built by developers and delivered by DevOps teams.

In many ways, data is a two-way exchange, and those end-users that are aware of this give and take appear to be happy with how the relationship works.

Indeed, several surveys in recent years suggested that the majority of consumers are happy to share their data with companies if it improves their experience. Furthermore, a significant minority are still comfortable if they have no control over who sees their data, there is no clarity around how data is stored and used, even if the organization in question has a poor reputation for data privacy.

The Privacy Balancing Act

So, if most people already accept data trade-offs in some shape or form, should developers still care about building applications and solutions that guarantee data privacy?

The short answer is yes, but as developers, that involves a tricky balancing act.

Although sharing data has become commonplace in exchange for benefits and value, consumers are becoming more aware of privacy issues. Take the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) as an example. Over the past five years, awareness has more than doubled in notable European markets such as the UK, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Meanwhile, there is also commercial pressure, as employers rely on developers to innovate to remain profitable. At the same time, customers expect brands to be responsible with their data, and failure to do so at the expense of trying to commercialize a new application could be detrimental. Indeed, while the pandemic may have ushered in significant changes and altered consumers’ attitudes toward data privacy, end users remain unwavering about the importance of security.

Maintaining this balancing act is becoming increasingly complex to achieve. However, the question of data privacy is becoming a key business priority, and that means developers have a big opportunity to show their commercial value to their organizations. Indeed, companies cannot afford to get the balance wrong, and developers are central to creating the perfect formula.

In fact, the privacy conundrum has been around for a long time.

When the internet was created, privacy was not considered an issue because all content accessed online was deemed to be public. Nothing was encrypted; the introduction of email complicated things, not least because anybody on the internet could, theoretically, intercept personal data and read private messages.

This prompted the emergence of the cypherpunks, a group of cryptographers who began to contemplate what the future of digital privacy might and should look like. They started to create the tools they believed the world needed to safeguard data privacy–today, their mission is carried on by developers who value user privacy.

Why Developers Need to Be Familiar With FHE

However, securing the transmission of data is not enough, as many breaches still occur because data isn’t encrypted during processing.

So, in a world where more and more data needs to be shared to deliver the sort of experiences consumers expect, is it inevitable that privacy and security will be compromised as the volume of data exchanges grows? Not necessarily.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers a solution, allowing developers to build applications and run services without needing to see or secure the underlying data. This is because FHE enables data to be processed blindly without having to decrypt it at any stage. FHE offers a way for developers to maintain that all-important balancing act between maintaining privacy and offering value to both business and customer.

In FHE, to guarantee a user’s data privacy, all data is encrypted by the user with their own secret key. Users of a particular service, such as an online medical portal, will use a secret key to send their encrypted data to a server where blind processing takes place. The result is also encrypted and sent back, the user again using their secret key to decrypt the information.

What this means is that, because data is encrypted end-to-end, the company providing the service can do so in a way that keeps the same customer experience, even though they cannot see the data that is being shared and sent back. From a security perspective, this is also critical. Governments, attackers and service providers cannot see the exchanged information because they do not possess the key–they also cannot break it, as the encryption used in FHE can resist attempts made even by powerful quantum computers.

Privacy can also be protected during larger-scale data exchanges that underpin collaboration between organizations and nation-states on numerous strategic programs, with each contributor able to add their value knowing that their intellectual property and sensitive information is not compromised.

Looking ahead, if developers can embed FHE into their practices on a broad scale, then a key milestone for privacy is within reach. Rather than being viewed as an objective relating to digital interactions, privacy can be treated as a naturally occurring by-product of every application, piece of software and service that the developer community creates.

June 20, 2023
Quali Adds Governance and Cloud Cost Control Tools to Automation Platform

Quali today revealed it added governance and cloud cost management tools to its Torque platform for automating IT infrastructure management.

David Williams, senior vice president for market strategy at Quali, said the added governance tools will make it possible to enforce security, compliance and consumption policies as IT environments are launched using the automation blueprints that Torque enables IT teams to create.

At the same time, IT teams can now also define consumption policies based on cloud runtime or regions employed within a cloud computing environment. In addition to taking advantage of dashboards to visualize consumption of cloud resources, IT teams can also use Torque to identify cloud waste including detached, inactive and overprovisioned instances. They can pause, right-size or tear down environments to reduce costs and eliminate the possibility of a billing surprise at the end of the month, noted Williams.

Torque also enables IT teams to detect drift and then update live cloud environments to remediate any that fall out of scope, he added.

Quali has been making a case for an environment-as-a-service approach to managing IT. That approach is based on a set of triggers for controlling infrastructure via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that can be invoked either via an application programming interface (API) or a graphical user interface (GUI).

In addition to providing a set of infrastructure provisioning guardrails that prevent mistakes from being made, Torque makes it possible to automatically deploy complete application environments on top of infrastructure provisioned as code using blueprints rather than relying on low-level Terraform scripts. The goal is to increase developer productivity by enabling IT teams to create self-service portals that developers can use to spin up environments.

That approach is becoming more appealing as many organizations begin to adopt platform engineering as a method to centralize the management of DevOps workflows, noted Williams. In fact, as part of that effort, many organizations are starting to unify the management of cloud and on-premises IT environments, he added.

While many developers routinely provision IT infrastructure using tools such as Terraform, many of them lack the cybersecurity expertise required to ensure cloud computing environments are configured properly. Developers also tend not to remember to de-provision cloud resources when no longer needed; over time, those factors contribute to unnecessarily increased cloud costs.

Ultimately, the goal is to find ways to centrally manage IT environments to reduce costs and improve cybersecurity without inhibiting the pace at which developers are building innovative applications, said Williams.

At the same time, as application environments become more complex, it is becoming even more challenging to provision and manage IT environments at a time when many organizations are reluctant to hire additional IT staff, he noted.

One way or another, IT environments will become more automated. The issue is determining how best to organize the IT teams managing those environments as tasks that once required a lot of manual effort are increasingly automated.

June 20, 2023
Four Ways to Modernize Your Enterprise Monoliths

In a perfect world, every application would run like Netflix–by which I mean every application would be cloud-native, microservices-based, containerized and, in all other senses of the word, modern. Unfortunately, not every application can be transformed in these ways. Some of the most important enterprise applications–like those powered by SAP or Oracle–don’t lend themselves to architectural transformations simply because the vendors don’t support that strategy. As much as organizations might wish that they could re-architect legacy apps from the ground up, the reality is that they just can’t.

Fortunately, though, all hope is not lost if you have an enterprise app that you can’t containerize or “microservices-ize.” Even if you can’t “break down your monolith”–to quote the standard advice you’ll find if you read articles about how to modernize legacy apps–there are a variety of practical steps you can take to make legacy, monolithic applications look and feel (in most respects) like modern, cloud-native apps.

Here are four ways to make your enterprise monolithic apps more cloud-friendly, even if they’re not technically cloud-native.

Use Cloud Automation to Modernize Legacy Application Management

Most enterprise apps are compatible with the cloud in the sense that you can host them on cloud-based virtual machine (VM) instances using services like Amazon EC2.

By taking advantage of cloud hosting for enterprise apps, organizations can also leverage cloud automation tools, such as autoscaling policies and rules that automatically start or stop VMs. In this way, it becomes possible to deploy enterprise apps in a highly scalable, automated way. You get something that resembles Kubernetes-based orchestration, except your apps don’t actually run in containers on top of Kubernetes. They’re just monoliths that benefit from cloud automation tools.

Deploy Load Balancers to Optimize Performance

Load balancers, which automatically manage network traffic flowing to and from applications, are another critical tool that organizations can easily leverage when they migrate legacy applications to the cloud.

Although configuring load balancers for enterprise apps hosted in the cloud is not a strict requirement, doing so can substantially improve application performance and reliability because load balancers help to ensure that requests are directed at application instances best able to handle them. They prevent situations where one instance of your application is overwhelmed with traffic while another sits idle.

Again, this is something that platforms like Kubernetes also do for microservices apps. But, as I’ve explained, you don’t actually need your app to run as microservices to take advantage of load balancing. You can do it with monolithic legacy apps, too.

Adopt an Everything-as-Code Strategy

When your app lives in the cloud and is managed by cloud automation tools, it becomes possible to manage most aspects of application operations via code. Specifically, you can:

● Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools to automate infrastructure provisioning and setup.
● Automate application configuration management using code rather than applying configuration changes manually.
● Codify operational processes, such as application updates and backups, instead of relying on manual operations.

Practices like these, which enable a strategy known as everything-as-code, significantly reduce the amount of time and manual effort that engineers spend managing applications. They also provide consistency and minimize the risk of errors due to human oversight. And there’s no reason why you can’t leverage these practices for legacy apps as well as modern ones.

Integrate Legacy Apps With Modern Toolchains

If your enterprise app is hosted on-premises, you probably manage it using tools and processes designed solely for it. But when you move an enterprise app to the cloud, it becomes possible to manage the application using the same integrated toolchain you deploy for other applications and processes.

You can, for example, take advantage of cloud-based monitoring tools to continuously collect data about application performance and generate automated alerts when something is wrong. Likewise, you can regularly create image-based backups of your application.

This toolchain-based operational strategy is another way to streamline enterprise application management, even in situations where you can’t rewrite or containerize the application itself.

Conclusion: Getting More From Legacy Apps

Just because you have a legacy enterprise app that you can’t transform into microservices doesn’t mean you have to settle for legacy management and operational practices. Modern automation tools combined with modern operational strategies like everything-as-code make it possible to achieve an enterprise application management experience that closely parallels that of fully modern, cloud-native apps, regardless of which architecture your app actually uses.

June 15, 2023
HashiCorp Releases Slew of Updates to Improve DevSecOps

At a HashiDays event this week, HashiCorp launched updates to its Terraform implementation and a software-as-a-service offering, dubbed HCP Vault Secrets, that promise to simplify infrastructure security and ensure that secrets are not leaked.

In addition, HashiCorp has added a self-hosted edition of its remote access security tool, Boundary, that can now also record SSH sessions. The company is also announcing general availability of Vault Secrets Operator, which provides a high level of abstraction for managing secrets in a Kubernetes environment and which synchronizes with the secrets management interfaces defined by the Kubernetes Technical Oversight Committee.

Finally, HashiCorp is making available in beta a 1.16 update to the Consul service mesh for containers and virtual machines that adds a Sameness Groups capability to improve the resiliency of microservices by redirecting requests to an identical service. HashiCorp has also added a transparent proxy mode to enable failover between services along with a permissive mutual TLS (mTLS) that enables a service to be configured to accept both mTLS traffic from mesh-enabled services and non-Consul mTLS traffic from external downstream applications.

Chris Van Wesep, senior director of product marketing for HashiCorp, said Version 1.5 of HashiCorp Terraform adds config-driven import workflow and check blocks capabilities that make it possible to declaratively use code to add existing resources into a Terraform state. Previously, the only way to update a Terraform state was to use an import command that could only be applied to one resource at a time. Terraform 1.5 also adds automatic code-generation capabilities for imported resources.

In addition, version 1.5 of Terraform also includes a tool to validate that provisioned infrastructure is behaving as intended. That latter capability makes it possible to reduce the number of misconfigurations created by developers that might one day be exploited by cybercriminals to breach an IT environment.

HCP Vault Secrets, meanwhile, provides a beta release of a SaaS edition of the existing Vault offering specifically designed to enable organizations to better manage application secrets that might inadvertently be exposed to cybercriminals in a production environment, said Van Wesep.

HashiCorp is moving toward providing a portfolio of tools that enable DevOps teams to securely provision and manage hybrid cloud computing environments using a common workflow, he noted. A Forrester Consulting survey found nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents are reporting this strategy is helping them reach their business goals, with another 19% adding they expected this strategy to help them achieve their business goals in the next year.

It’s not clear whether organizations are fully embracing multi-cloud computing, but each additional cloud added to an enterprise IT environment increases the total cost of IT. The only way to mitigate those costs is to define a set of best practices for building and deploying applications that can be applied to any cloud computing environment.

Unfortunately, many organizations will discover that, as they attempt to define those best practices, they have inadvertently become dependent on a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) that thwart those efforts.

June 13, 2023
Survey Finds Cloud Management Strategies Shifting

Even though organizations continue to consume cloud resources inefficiently, they continue to increase the amount of money allocated. These were among the findings of a global survey of 1,000 technology practitioners and decision-makers conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of HashiCorp.

The survey found a full 94% of respondents reported that their organization struggled with cloud waste. Top factors contributing to avoidable cloud spending included overprovisioning resources (50%), idle or underused resources (50%) and a lack of needed skills (43%). Nevertheless, more than half of respondents (56%) said they boosted their cloud spending in the last year compared to 22% which reduced it.

At the same time, however, 92% of respondents said they are moving toward adopting, standardizing or scaling platform teams as part of an effort to centralize the management of cloud services, but only 39% are scaling the use of platform teams throughout the organization. The survey also found, however, that organizations are addressing skills shortages by adopting a common operating model/shared automated workflows (58%), reskilling/upskilling (56%) and working with partners (43%).

The survey also found many organizations are also committed to multi-cloud computing, with nearly three-quarters (73%) reporting this strategy is helping them reach their business goals. Another 19% said they expected this strategy to help them achieve their business goals in the next year.

The most-cited reasons for adopting a multi-cloud strategy were reliability (51%), cost reduction (48%), security and governance (45%), digital transformation (45%) and scalability (45%). Only 10% had no choice but to go multi-cloud due to acquisitions or other issues.

Security (88%), availability (84%) and scalability (84%) were identified most often as being important/very important multi-cloud success factors, followed closely by regulatory/compliance requirements (82%), staffing and skill levels (82%), budget (80%), visibility into cloud infrastructure (78%), automated tooling (77%) and platform teams (75%).

The top cloud initiatives were data protection (77%), followed by secrets management and access control (both at 75%), the survey finds. The top security concerns were password/credentials/secrets leakage (50%) followed by data theft (49%), phishing (46%) and ransomware (42%).

Overall, respondents said the biggest benefits of having a multi-cloud computing strategy were a stronger security posture (74%) and helping attract, motivate and retain skilled staffers (68%).

Chris Van Wesep, senior director of product marketing for HashiCorp, said it’s clear organizations are purposely using multiple clouds to reduce costs by pitting one cloud service provider against another. The challenge organizations face when using that approach is they need to define a consistent set of development processes that can be used across multiple clouds to keep total costs under control.

Organizations that embrace multi-cloud computing are also more likely to implement security best practices because of their need to consistently manage multiple cloud computing environments, he added.

Of course, there is always going to be a great disparity between high- and low-performing organizations. The survey found that about 25% of survey respondents are high performing, with an equal number falling at the other end of the spectrum. The rest fall somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum. The issue is that the gulf between the high and low ends of that spectrum appears to be widening as more organizations fail to muster the level of skills and expertise needed to succeed in the cloud era.

June 12, 2023