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Eyal Estrin for AWS Community Builders

Posted on • Originally published at eyal-estrin.Medium

Using immutable infrastructure to achieve cloud security

Maintaining cloud infrastructure, especially compute components, requires a lot of effort – from patch management, secure configuration, and more.

Other than the efforts it takes for the maintenance part, it simply will not scale.

Will we be able to support our workloads when we need to scale to thousands of machines at peak?

Immutable infrastructure is a deployment method where compute components (virtual machines, containers, etc.) are never updated – we simply replace a running component with a new one and decommission the old one.

Immutable infrastructure has its advantages, such as:

  • No dependent on previous VM/container state
  • No configuration drifts
  • The fast configuration management process
  • Easy horizontal scaling
  • Simple rollback/recovery process

The Twelve-Factor App

Designing modern or cloud-native applications requires us to follow 12 principles, documents in https://12factor.net

Looking at this guide, we see that factor number 3 (config) guides us to store configuration in environment variables, outside our code (or VMs/containers).

For further reading, see:

If we continue to follow the guidelines, factor number 6 (processes) guides us to create stateless processes, meaning, separating the execution environment and the data, and keeping all stateful or permanent data in an external service such as a database or object storage.

For further reading, see:

How do we migrate to immutable infrastructure?

Build a golden image

Follow the cloud vendor's documentation about how to download the latest VM image or container image (from a container registry), update security patches, binaries, and libraries to the latest version, customize the image to suit the application's needs, and store the image in a central image repository.

It is essential to copy/install only necessary components inside the image and remove any unnecessary components – it will allow you to keep a minimal image size and decrease the attack surface.

It is recommended to sign your image during the storage process in your private registry, to make sure it was not changed and that it was created by a known source.

For further reading, see:

Create deployment pipeline

Create a CI/CD pipeline to automate the following process:

  • Check for new software/binaries/library versions against well-known and signed repositories
  • Pull the latest image from your private image repository
  • Update the image with the latest software and configuration changes in your image registry
  • Run automated tests (unit tests, functional tests, acceptance tests, integration tests) to make sure the new build does not break the application
  • Gradually deploy a new version of your VMs / containers and decommission old versions

For further reading, see:

Continues monitoring

Continuously monitor for compliance against your desired configuration settings, security best practices (such as CIS benchmark hardening settings), and well-known software vulnerabilities.

In case any of the above is met, create an automated process, and use your previously created pipeline to replace the currently running images with the latest image version from your registry.

For further reading, see:

Summary

In this article, we have reviewed the concept of immutable infrastructure, its benefits, and the process for creating a secure, automated, and scalable solution for building immutable infrastructure in the cloud.

References

About the Author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, the owner of the blog Security & Cloud 24/7 and the author of the book Cloud Security Handbook, with more than 20 years in the IT industry.
You can connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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