devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: IT environments

Teleport Unifies Infrastructure and Application Workload Security

Teleport today added an offering that makes it simpler to declaratively secure IT infrastructure and workloads using short-lived X.509 certificates.

The Teleport Machine & Workload Identity platform is designed to unify the management of authentication, authorization and access control for non-human identities, in a way that eliminates reliance on static passwords, application programming interface (API) keys and application secrets that are easily compromised.

Teleport CEO Ev Kontsevoy said as IT environments become more dynamic it’s become apparent that enforcing zero-trust IT policies requires providing IT teams that provision infrastructure to deploy software a simpler way to consistently manage access, including the ability to discover existing machine and workload identities.

That’s critical because cybersecurity teams are only able to assess how policies are being enforced, he noted. It is DevOps and platform engineering teams that are responsible for initially providing access to the IT environment using programmatic tools that can easily result in misconfigurations, that can be avoided using a more declarative approach, Kontsevoy noted.

In furtherance of that effort, The Teleport Machine and Workload Identity platform also provides integrations with open policy agents, APIs, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone (SPIFFE) frameworks.

Additionally, DevOps teams can apply fine-grained attribute-based and role-based access controls across a set of ephemeral authorization policies that can be dynamically applied as needed.

The Teleport Machine & Workload Identity also provides access to logs and exportable audit trails to make it simpler to comply with a wide range of regulatory frameworks.

Finally, the Teleport Machine & Workload Identity platform also provides a multi-region high availability option capable of scaling up to 140,000 connected resources across nine availability zones.

Much of the focus on implementing zero-trust IT policies has been on securing the credentials of end users. However, the IT infrastructure environment itself has remained comparatively insecure. Each element of the IT environment, including workloads, needs to be assigned an identity that can then be used to limit how much access can be gained through it, said Kontsevoy.

Cybercriminals have already proven they are extremely adept at exploiting and escalating privileges that they have found a way to access. Many of the breaches that have occurred in data centers can be traced back to access to a stolen credential. The challenge is the number of non-human identities involving, for example, application programming interfaces (APIs), that can potentially be exploited far exceeds the number that have been assigned to end users.

While a lot of effort has been clearly made to enforce best DevSecOps practices, the simplest thing for most organizations to improve software supply chain security is to apply more controls to how IT infrastructure is provisioned. The sad truth is that far too many application developers have access to far too many resources, using a set of passwords that have probably already been stolen multiple times over. The only way to address that issue is to eliminate the dependency on passwords as rapidly as possible. Otherwise, it’s not so much a question of whether an IT environment will be compromised but rather to what extent.

February 25, 2025
CloudBolt Acquires SovLabs to Advance Hybrid Cloud Strategy

CloudBolt Software this week announced it has acquired SovLabs, a provider of a framework that extends the reach of automation frameworks from VMware.

Company CEO Jeff Kukowski said that as a provider of a cloud management platform, the SovLabs framework will extend CloudBolt’s reach deeper into VMware environments that have already invested in automation tools from VMware.

As IT environments become more widely distributed across a range of platforms, demand for a platform that enables IT teams to centralize the management of multiple cloud computing environments has increased, Kukowski said. The addition of SovLabs to the CloudBolt portfolio will make it easier to bridge the divide between cloud computing platforms and enterprise on-premises IT environments that have standardized on VMware.

CloudBolt has been making a consistent effort to enable IT teams to invoke its cloud management framework via whichever IT automation framework they have adopted, including tools such as Terraform. The goal is to reduce the need for IT organizations to rely on their own custom-built code to achieve that goal, said Kukowski.

In general, many IT organizations are now investing more heavily in centralizing the management of multiple IT environments as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. That shift is accelerating a transition to hybrid cloud computing models that require increased reliance on IT automation.

The challenge many organizations face is enterprise IT environments tend to have many islands of IT automation in place. CloudBolt is pursuing a strategy that enables IT teams to extend those islands of automation or access CloudBolt directly to manage hybrid cloud computing environments.

The CloudBolt approach offers IT teams an alternative to relying on a single platform vendor to achieve hybrid cloud computing. VMware, for example, has been making a case for deploying VMware vSphere on multiple clouds versus relying on the virtual machines provided by a cloud service provider. Most of the large cloud service providers are simultaneously pushing to deploy instances of their platforms in on-premises IT environments that can be managed as an extension of a public cloud.

It’s too early to say how this titanic battle for control over hybrid cloud computing will play out. CloudBolt, however, is betting that rather than getting locked into a single platform, many IT organizations will prefer to run toward some neutral ground to deploy a control plane capable of managing multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.

Of course, CloudBolt is not the only provider of a cloud management platform making this case. Competition between providers of hybrid cloud management platforms is heating up as interest in hybrid cloud computing starts to move beyond the theoretical. Regardless of the path forward chosen, history would suggest that most IT organizations in the months ahead will be seeking more control over their IT environments.

June 4, 2020
Self-Service Portal From env0 Reins in Public Cloud Costs

A platform that provides IT teams with a self-service portal through which they can both control access to and the cost of cloud resource consumption is now available in beta for free from env0.

Company CEO Ohad Maislish said that while many organizations have implemented self-service portals to control who can access resources on public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it’s apparent more workloads will be heading into the cloud in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to make organizations more resilient. As a result, there’s now a lot more sensitivity to cloud costs.

Rather than relying on estimations or manual tagging, Maislish said env0 allows IT teams automatically tag infrastructure in a way that ties cloud resources to a predetermined budget using an engine designed for that purpose. All too often, organizations wind up spending a lot more on public cloud resources than planned simply because there is no way to track spending in real-time, he noted.

In addition, it is common for organizations to find themselves being billed for “phantom workloads” that are created when developers forget to de-provision virtual machines, for example. The env0 platform provides automatic shutdown and time-to-live (TTL) options to eliminate that issue, said Maislish.

Env0 is fresh off raising $3.3 million in funding. The env0 platform, expected to be generally available in the fall, also makes available policy controls for managing passwords, keys and tokens along with role-based access controls.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a tendency for organizations to not pay a lot of attention to cloud costs. Achieving faster rates of building and deploying applications was considered a much higher priority. Most organizations will continue to put a premium on delivering applications faster. However, achieving that goal will be weighted more carefully against the total cost, especially as finance teams start issuing stricter cost mandates. In many organizations, the unfettered access to cloud resources that developers once enjoyed is likely to be more constrained.

Of course, env0 is not the only platform promising to help organizations rein in cloud costs. However, it has combined access and financial controls in a way many organizations have been unable to achieve. In fact, the biggest challenge when it comes to containing cloud costs may very well turn out to be the will to enforce controls on developers who previously had a wide amount of latitude.

It’s difficult to assess right now at what rate applications will be moving into the cloud. Many organizations may decide to lift and shift monolithic applications into the cloud as the first step toward making their IT environments more resilient. Others may accelerate the rate at which they are building and deploying new applications as once nascent digital business initiatives are transformed into business continuity strategies. Whatever the motivation, the days when many developers could spin up a virtual machine in a public cloud almost at will are most likely coming to an end.

April 21, 2020
New Relic Accelerates AIOps with SignifAI Acquisition

New Relic, following its acquisition of SignifAI, is in the process of accelerating its investments in machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an effort to make it easier to separate the signal from the noise created by all the alerts in an IT environment.

Aaron Johnson, senior vice president of product management at New Relic, said SignifAI represents an opportunity for New Relic to create a superset platform that can apply advanced analytics to a much wider range of data sources. SignifAI has already created more than 60 integrations spanning open source and commercial monitoring tools that are widely used across DevOps toolchains, he noted, adding that as New Relic moves to add other data sources, there’s an opportunity for the company to distinguish itself beyond providing software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools for monitoring applications and infrastructure.

It’s obviously still early days for AI in the realm of DevOps. But it’s also clear that with the rise of microservices and containers, soon it will be impracticable for IT organizations to manually manage their IT environments. Various forms of automation based on AIOps platforms infused with machine and deep learning algorithms will be required. As a provider of SaaS-based tools for monitoring applications and infrastructure, New Relic already has access to vast amounts of data required to train AI models on optimizing a specific IT environment.

Of course, there’s lots of competition across the IT monitoring category, so it remains to be seen which vendors will have the resources required to drive continuing investments in AIOps.

In the meantime, DevOps teams will need to adjust their processes to take advantage of AIOps. It’s unlikely AIOps platforms will eliminate the need for DevOps teams, but the number of applications and platforms any DevOps team must manage effectively will increase substantially. Rather than replacing humans, AIOps platforms will reduce the pressure to hire additional IT staff when professionals with DevOps skills are already in short supply. The AIOps platform, for all intents and purposes, acts like a co-pilot.

The biggest issue IT organizations are likely to encounter along that journey is establishing trust with any AIOps platform they implement. It takes a while for most AI models to learn the IT environment before that platform makes any reliable recommendations. In most cases, DevOps teams will have to dedicate staff to train and update AI models continuously as the IT environment changes. It may take years, however, before DevOps teams are comfortable enough to move beyond trusting a recommendation and enable an AIOps platform to automate processes on its own. After all, the only thing worse about being wrong about any IT decision is being wrong about it at scale.

AI at this point is all but inevitable in DevOps environments. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that just because something is based on AI it always will be smarter than experienced DevOps professionals.

— Mike Vizard

February 20, 2019