Building Security Into DevOps: The Emergence of DevOps
In this post we will outline some of the key characteristics of DevOps. In fact, for those of you new to the concept, this is the most valuable post in this series. We believe that DevOps is one of the most disruptive trends to ever hit application development, and will be driving organizational changes for the next decade. But it’s equally disruptive for application security, and in a good way. It enables security testing, validation and monitoring to be interwoven with application development and deployment. To illustrate why we believe this is disruptive – both for application development and for application security, we are first going to delve into what Dev Ops is and talk about how it changes the entire development approach. What is it? We are not to dive too deep into the geeky theoretical aspects of DevOps as it stays outside our focus for this research paper. However, as you begin to practice DevOps you’ll need to delve into it’s foundational elements to guide your efforts, so we will reference several here. DevOps is born out of lean manufacturing, Kaizen and Deming’s principles around quality control techniques. The key idea is a continuous elimination of waste, which results in improved efficiency, quality and cost savings. There are numerous approaches to waste reduction, but key to software development are the concepts of reducing work-in-progress, finding errors quickly to reduce re-work costs, scheduling techniques and instrumentation of the process so progress can be measured. These ideas have been in proven in practice for decades, but typically applied to manufacturing of physical goods. DevOps applies these practices to software delivery, and when coupled with advances in automation and orchestration, become a reality. So theory is great, but how does that help you understand DevOps in practice? In our introductory post we said: DevOps is an operational framework that promotes software consistency and standardization through automation. Its focus is on using automation to do a lot of the heavy lifting of building, testing, and deployment. Scripts build organizational memory into automated processes to reduce human error and force consistency. In essence development, quality assurance and IT operations teams automate as much of their daily work as they can, investing the time up front to make things easier and more consistent over the long haul. And the focus is not just the applications, or even an application stack, but the entire supporting eco-system. One of our commenters for the previous post termed it ‘infrastructure as code’, a handy way to think about the configuration, creation and management of the underlying servers and services that applications rely upon. From code check-in, through validation, to deployment and including run time monitoring; anything used to get applications into the hands of users is part of the assembly. Using scripts and programs to automate builds, functional testing, integration testing, security testing and even deployment, automation is a large part of the value. It means each subsequent release is a little faster, and a little more predictable, than the last. But automation is only half the story, and in terms of disruption, not the most important half. The Organizational Impact DevOps represents an cultural change as well, and it’s the change in the way the organization behaves that has the most profound impact. Today, development teams focus on code development, quality assurance on testing, and operations on keeping things running. In practice these three activities are not aligned, and in many firms, become competitive to the point of being detrimental. Under DevOps, development, QA and operations work together to deliver stable applications; efficient teamwork is the job. This subtle change in focus has a profound effect on the team dynamic. It removes much of the friction between groups as they no longer work on their pieces in isolation. It also minimizes many of the terrible behaviors that cause teams grief; incentives to push code before it’s ready, the fire drills to fix code and deployment issues at the release date, over-burdening key people, ad-hoc changes to production code and systems, and blaming ‘other’ groups for what amounts to systemic failures. Yes, automation plays a key role in tackling repetitive tasks, both reducing human error and allowing people to focus on tougher problems. But DevOps effect is almost as if someone opens a pressure relief value when teams, working together, identify and address the things that complicate the job of getting quality software produced. Performing simpler tasks, and doing them more often, releasing code becomes reflexive. Building, buying and integrating tools needed to achieve better quality, visibility and just make things easer help every future release. Success begets success. Some of you reading this will say “That sounds like what Agile development promised”, and you would be right. But Agile development techniques focused on the development team, and suffers in organizations where project management, testing and IT are not agile. In our experience this is why we see companies fail in their transition to Agile. DevOps focuses on getting your house in order first, targeting the internal roadblocks that introduce errors and slow the process down. Agile and DevOps are actually complementary to one another, with Agile techniques like scrum meetings and sprints fitting perfectly within a DevOps program. And DevOps ideals on scheduling and use of Kanban board’s have morphed into Agile Scrumban tools for task scheduling. These things are not mutually exclusive, rather they fit very well together! Problems it solves DevOps solves several problems, many of them I’ve alluded to above. Here I will discuss the specifics in a little greater detail, and the bullets bullet items have some intentional overlap. When you are knee deep in organizational dysfunction, it is often hard to pinpoint the causes. In practice it’s usually multiple issues that both make thing more complicated and mask the true nature of the problem. As such I want to discuss what problems DevOps solve from multiple viewpoints. Reduced errors: Automation reduces errors that are common when performing basic – and repetitive – tasks. And more to the point, automation is intended to stop ad-hoc changes to systems; these
