DEV Community: Vishnu Vasudevan

What is GitHub Actions and how does it compare?

Vishnu Vasudevan — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:42:19 +0000

I have a codebase that has around nine hundred links in it. It's called Every Link I Wish I Had as a Beginner, and it's a compilation of links that helped me to learn more as a developer. Inside there are links to educational resources about software paradigms, encoding, encryption, learning new programming languages, along with others.

But I was worried that in a year or two, link rot would leave me with a codebase filled with broken links. Checking them all manually was out of the question—there were way too many.

When I researched to find a solution for running code on an automated schedule, I found developers recommending GitHub Actions as a solution. (Later in the blog I'll tell you a secret alternative that overcomes GitHub Actions shortcomings.)

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is an automation tool offered by GitHub that allows you to run workflows on a user-determined schedule.

In my case, I could write a super-simple Node.js script to retrieve the links from my text file and check that they all still worked. All I'd need to do is make a network request to the URL, and then check the HTTP status code that returned. If it returned an HTTP 404 or similar, I would know the link was a candidate to be removed from my repository. Perfect.

GitHub Actions here essentially operates via an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) process. IaC is uses code configuration files, such as YAML files, to provision computer resources to the developers requesting them.

This is the YAML file I created:


# This workflow will do a clean install of node dependencies, cache/restore them, build the source code and run tests across different versions of node

# For more information see: https://help.github.com/actions/language-and-framework-guides/using-nodejs-with-github-actions

name: Node.js Link Rot prevention

on:

  schedule:

    - cron: '0 0 1 * *'

jobs:

  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    strategy:

      matrix:

        node-version: [16.x]

        # See supported Node.js release schedule at https://nodejs.org/en/about/releases/

    steps:

    - uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}

      uses: actions/setup-node@v2

      with:

        node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}

        cache: 'npm'

    - run: npm install

    - run: node ./index

    - run: git config --local user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"

    - run: git config --local user.name "github-actions[bot]"

    - run: git add broken.txt

    - run: git commit -m "GitHub actions link rot prevention"

    - name: Push changes

      uses: ad-m/github-push-action@master

      with:

        github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

        branch: ${{ github.ref }}

The code above is a request to GitHub to allocate me a server to action my code on a specific day and time.

There are multiple ways to trigger your request for servers using GitHub Actions.

The example above uses cron to tell GitHub when you want this Action to run. cron is a command-line utility to schedule jobs in a Unix-like environment. You can specify the minute, hours, day of the month, month, and day of the week you need the job to run on.

Workflows can also be triggered by events. A full list of events that can be used to trigger GitHub Actions can be found here, but some of the more common are:

When someone deletes a Git branch or tag.
Whenever someone deploys.
When a discussion in your repository is created or modified.

Now I run my Node script on the first day of each month and send all the non-responsive links to a text file that a bot automatically commits into my repo. I then double-check them manually, and it takes me less than a minute.

This was great and fixed my problem. I've been able to remove several dead links since I started this workflow, which has helped improve the quality of the feature or code.

Why Does DevOps Need GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is a simple way to run code at a periodic time.

You've already looked at one use case, but developers worldwide use GitHub Actions for a huge variety of tasks, such as closing stale pull requests, automatically linting a codebase, doing deployments, and running integration or unit tests and running security scans.

The Actions are language agnostic, so while the example above used Node, there's no need to use a specific language. This means that almost any code you can package into an executable script can be run via GitHub Actions, which covers a huge number of use cases—anything that makes sense for your business to automate.

GitHub Actions offer a number of benefits, too. The Actions are easily repeatable, and they run on GitHub's servers, which are pretty resilient—GitHub even posts availability reports. GitHub is also owned by one of the biggest tech companies in the world, so neither they nor Actions are likely to disappear, forcing you to abruptly migrate.

Limitations of GitHub Actions

No software solution is perfect, and while GitHub Actions can be a solution for many problems, there are also some drawbacks to consider.

Requires YAML Familiarity
Although YAML isn't incredibly complex, it's still a potential hurdle for new users. There are tools that generate the YAML for you, which means you probably won't have to write it. But if complex pipeline needs to be constructed with security and quality gates with thresholds, it requires in-depth knowledge on the YAML.

Only Coders Can Make Full Use of the Platform
GitHub Actions isn’t friendly to people who aren't already technically strong. There's no GUI, and it's not a low- or no-code solution, which makes it significantly less accessible for people who don't already have solid coding skills, or who simply don't want to learn YAML.

Reading through the docs can be intimidating, and there's a level of technical knowledge assumed that many people don't have—or need to have.

If you have the technical skills to be able to make full use of GitHub Actions, it’s worth considering. Even if you can sort out the GitHub Actions config, you're still going to need to write custom code to run, which is one more thing to write, debug, and maintain.

Actions is Hard to Debug
When I made my GitHub Action, I lost a lot of time debugging an issue with it. The machine that was running my Action was Unix based, and the terminal was case-sensitive—but my local machine is Windows, where the terminal isn't case-sensitive.

When it was run locally, my Node script worked fine. But my GitHub Action kept failing to run, and it took me hours to discover why. It's easy to make a tiny mistake, like using a lowercase letter when you should've used a capital one, and lose hours debugging, even though the actual error takes only a second to fix.

The observability, feedback cycles, and logs are all something that could be improved. It’s hard to have visibility into the actions to see exactly what is causing the failure. I needed to log multiple times in the file, then wait for it to run again to debug.

Max Execution Time Limits
You can't run extremely compute-heavy jobs on GitHub Actions, as its max execution time per job is six hours.

While not a common issue, it is one that some users have encountered. The only real way to resolve it is to break up your script, change providers, or self-host your infrastructure.

A Better Alternative to GitHub Actions

Opsera is a continuous orchestration tool. Opsera solves problems similar to the ones that GitHub Actions does, but with some simple and notable improvements.

Opsera was created due to the founders' frustration with the way that software teams were forced to rely on manual coding integrations or use single-vendor solutions that lock you in. Opsera empowers developers by enabling them to use any tool, any stack, any platform.

Opsera can help users avoid many of the limitations of GitHub Actions.

Solving Actions' Problems
Opsera is a platform for everyone: developers, non-technical staff, and executives. Knowledge of YAML shouldn’t bar people from building the tools they need, which is why Opsera allows users to create no-code pipelines from a point-and-click graphical user interface (GUI). You can add security gates and quality control with thresholds and approvals, all from the GUI they offer—no coding required. By removing the need-to-know YAML, a no-code platform allows more people to contribute, so you can draw from a wider talent base instead of looking for people with specific niche skill sets.

Opsera allows you to choose your own tools, and they can take care of the rest. This approach is far more declarative and allows you to focus on what to build—not how to build it. You can stop writing glue or custom scripts and select the tools that will provide the most value without worrying about vendor lock-in or how they'll fit into your existing stack. All the above frees up time so your developers focus on more important tasks.

My GitHub Actions bug left me debugging for hours, but Opsera was built with end-to-end visibility in mind. Pre-built diagnostics, delivery analytics, auditing, and compliance are all observability metrics provided by Opsera, enabling you to run your automated toolchains quicker.

GitHub Actions doesn't offer observability metrics, but Opsera offers a multitude of them. Including a comprehensive analytics suite with over 100 KPIs to enable you c make smarter decisions at every stage of your software development lifecycle. All these metrics can be accessed on a native CLI that's similar to kubectl, which is why site reliability engineers love Opsera.

Conclusion

You've looked at some common problems that can be solved by using software solutions like GitHub Actions and how Opsera, a continuous orchestration tool, can be used to solve these problems without requiring any coding or specialized knowledge. To learn more about Opsera, you can explore their resources center, which is full of blog posts, case studies, webinars, and videos to learn more about how no-code DevOps can improve your workflows.

How DevOps Platform Can Secure You Against Log4j Vulnerabilities

Vishnu Vasudevan — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:22:37 +0000

More than 45% of companies have had a security breach in the past few years. Heightened security measures aren’t just a necessity, they are absolutely critical to the protection of software systems.

Log4j vulnerability is a security risk when logging into a java library. Log4j is recognized as an open-source library, used by different apps. However, if Log4j is left unprotected, hackers can take passwords and information and infect malicious malware into software systems.

Since Log4j is used universally, there’s greater vulnerability. Log4j is used with individuals when they use apps. And for organizations who need to be aware of how their web servers and applications are at risk.

The concern for software companies is if this is a DevOps security problem and how it’s preventable.

How Log4j Is Affecting DevOps Security

DevOps is responsible for software security and automation. So, when it comes to Log4j security measures, DevOps is responsible for these security measures. Since DevOps tracks all the components that go into an application, they should determine what vulnerabilities exist within that application.

When Log4j or any other vulnerability compromises an internally developed application, will DevOps teams have a process to mitigate these issues? In addition, would security teams be able to isolate the attack and mitigate its damage? Do software organizations have DevOps practices to prepare to mitigate compromised code?

Log4j is affecting DevOps security through trial and error. Breaches in the past that affected Log4j have made DevOps security teams more accountable. It makes software security organizations accountable.

However, Log4j is not an issue of the past, but rather a focus on the future of software security. These security issues will continue to arise in the future. Learning how to prepare for them will be the difference between some software security companies.

How a DevOps Platform Will Reduce the Impact of Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Log4j vulnerabilities may present software security issues, but even more revealing is how it shows the need for greater security software. Although it’s an impossible task to protect all security vulnerabilities, organizations need to realize the value of maintaining their information, to restore it safely and quickly.

While DevOps security teams should have these best practices in place, it’s also important to implement no-code DevOps orchestration in organizations. Because it helps automate and reduce the impact of product vulnerabilities.

The future of software security is in no-code DevOps orchestration. Here’s how it benefits organizations.

‍Automates scanning for vulnerabilities
Efficiency is found in advanced automation.

Solving security issues quickly and efficiently is highly important in order to mitigate security issues. With manual code inspection, there’s often way too much time devoted to tasks that could be automated. Manual code inspections compared to automation also lead to more errors.

With no-code DevOps orchestration, automated CI/CD pipelines automate building the code. They are also scanning for vulnerabilities, unit testing, and deployment to development, QA and production. ‍

Sends automatic security alerts
As a result of automation, organizations are more aware of security vulnerabilities faster. And they can respond more efficiently with the proper measures.

DevOps teams can send automatic security alerts that make organizations aware of what steps need to be taken to mitigate the issue. This empowers your team to focus on other tasks while advanced software automation focuses on sending security alerts.‍

Assesses the impact of vulnerability with detailed insights

Security insights help you assess future security threats. With these insights, your organization will have the opportunity to efficiently work on security issues through automation.

In addition to looking ahead, you can also analyze the risk of security vulnerabilities. You can assess how your team resolved past issues and what steps need to be taken to improve that process.

Implementing no-code DevOps orchestration enables these real-time insights. They help security teams to respond more efficiently so that fixes across end-to-end deployment can happen as quickly as possible.

In addition, everyone in the organization needs to work in unison, to look at the details of the cybersecurity threat. With No-code DevOps orchestration, your organization easily integrates all of the tools within the software development ecosystem so that every step of the process is visible.

Offers visibility across an organization
With detailed insights and automated security alerts, organizations have universal visibility. They can find compromise due to a vulnerability like Log4j.

While these insights don’t make vulnerabilities nonexistent, they do help no-code DevOps orchestration build a seamless process on how to address these vulnerabilities.

How a Fortune 100 company used Opsera to tide over the Log4j crisis

Opsera is no stranger to solving a Log4j crisis. When a Fortune 100 company had such a crisis, Opsera solved it efficiently and quickly.

This Fortune 100 has been in defense and industry equipment manufacturing for 100+ years. While they had an IT team to innovate faster through better intelligence, automation, and other forms of digital transformation across the supply chain, there was still a security risk.

Their Log4j vulnerability exposed one of any team’s biggest obstacles: a lack of visibility and transparency in their libraries. With this vulnerability, it would normally have taken an IT team more than a week to secure systems against the Log4j vulnerability manually. And this was not fast enough.

With Opsera, the client’s team immediately identified the software components that were compromised. Individual code no longer needed to be scanned manually; in fact, scans can be automated and scheduled to run within Opsera’s orchestration platform. This saved the team countless hours and let them turn their focus to building the change to actually fix the issues.

Opsera has integrations with DevSecOps tools like Sonarqube, Twistlock, Anchor, Vault, and Coverity, making everything easier.

After the team applied the fix for their Log4j version, they used Opsera’s no-code pipelines and unified insights to build the code, scan for vulnerabilities, do unit testing, and deploy to all three instances: development, QA, and production.

As a result, the team executed 164 pipelines and 500+ releases across all environments in less than 48 hours, slamming the door on its Log4j vulnerabilities.

10 Best Infrastructure-as-Code Tools for Automating Deployments in 2022

Vishnu Vasudevan — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:16:11 +0000

IT technologies continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. From cloud computing to DevOps and artificial intelligence (AI) to internet of things (IoT), the technology landscape has unlocked potential opportunities for IT businesses to generate value.

The enterprise IT infrastructure has become crucial for modern-day digital business. It is because it facilitates the compute, network and data capabilities required to run business-critical software applications. The key role of infrastructure goes beyond production environs. It spreads across the complete development process. The infrastructure includes a host of components including servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases. They also include DevOps tools, CI/CD platforms, staging environments, and testing tools. But there’s a catch here.

With the rapidly changing technology landscape, the traditional approaches to infrastructure are hampering businesses to adapt, innovate, and thrive optimally. The manual process of managing infrastructure has become obsolete and fails to meet the demands of the DevOps-based high-speed software development cycles.

The need of the hour is an infrastructure focused on continuous innovation, automation, and optimization. An infrastructure that can help organizations keep pace with rapid software development and accelerated technological change. And, at this juncture, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools have emerged as the key to navigating this challenge. Let’s delve deep into the details:

What Are Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Tools?

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is the process of codifying and managing underlying IT infrastructure as software. It enables DevOps teams to automatically manage, monitor, and provision resources, instead of manually configuring multifarious hardware devices and operating systems. IaC is also referred to as programmable or software-defined infrastructure.

With IaC tools at their disposal, DevOps teams can easily edit and distribute configurations, while ensuring a stable state of the infrastructure. The IaC tools allow easy integration of infrastructure into the version control mechanisms and provide the ability to imbibe automation for infrastructure provisioning and management.

What Are the Benefits of Using Infrastructure as Code Tools?

IaC tools have transformed the way IT infrastructure is provisioned and managed today. They paved the way for complete automation and configuration of infrastructure, with its elements such as physical servers, configuring networks, and databases being treated similarly to software. This empowered development teams to adopt a range of DevOps and Agile practices that automate and fast-track software development processes. The IaC tools helped teams to leverage best practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and test-driven development (TDD). Moreover, IaC enabled businesses to make the most of deployment orchestration, automated testing libraries, and version control systems (VCS). Besides these salient features, the IaC tools offered a host of businesses benefits as follows:

High Transparency and Accountability
The IaC source code files are versioned, and configuration control. This bestows teams with high traceability, rollbacks, and branching.

Improved Configuration Consistency
Unplanned changes or updates lead to asymmetric development, testing, staging, and production environment. This, in turn, results in configuration drift. This is where IaC tools come in.

IaC helps avoid configuration drift by provisioning identical and reproducible environs every time. Moreover, this environment can be scaled as per the demands by leveraging the centralized/reusable module with the reserved configurations as many times as needed.

Enhanced Speed and Efficiency
With IaC tools, teams can set up infrastructure swiftly within a short turnaround time by simply running a uniform code stored in SCM, making it repeatable and scalable. This can be implemented at all stages of the application delivery lifecycle, from the development to the production stage. This results in more efficient and faster software development.

Improved Cloud Utilization
In a bid to gain the best of both clouds, businesses across the globe are leveraging multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. However, multi and hybrid clouds have multifarious software-defined APIs, giving rise to unwanted bottlenecks. And IaC tools are the best way to abstract the layers from the heterogeneity of the cloud.

Cost Optimization
As infrastructure as code tools eliminate the need for resources in terms of time, budget, and staff to manually provision, scale, and manage the infrastructure, businesses can save potential costs. Moreover, as IaC is platform-agnostic, businesses can leverage cloud computing solutions and benefit from its advantages such as flexibility and pay-as-you-go pricing. They can also save costs by deploying automation strategies that help technical teams to relieve error-prone, manual tasks and divert their valuable time towards developing innovative and mission-critical applications.

What Are the Must-have Features of an Iac Tool?

The above benefits emphasize the need for IaC tools in the present-day DevOps world. But choosing the right set of IaC tools that rightly fit the business needs can be a herculean task. This is because there are numerous IaC tools available in the market, with a wide range of overlapping features and differences. Taking due cognizance of this challenge, we have curated the must-have features of an IaC tool to help you choose the best tool for your organization:

Ease of Use
One of the most prominent USPs of an IaC tool is its ease of use. The tool must make it simple to configure, deploy, and manage IaC across numerous infrastructure environments.

Multi-cloud Compatibility
Organizations across the world are now moving to multi-cloud to lower the risk of cloud downtime and business outage. Moreover, they gain the flexibility to use the best possible cloud for each workload, to improve performance. So, IaC tools must be multi-cloud compatible to enable businesses to manage infrastructure across multiple cloud environments. The IaC platform must be designed from the ground up to meet the demands of the modern cloud.

Adoption by Industry Experts
Before adopting infrastructure as a code tool, businesses must do some research on how the tool is adopted across the industry. This research helps in understanding the ins and outs of the tool. As there are innumerable IaC tools available in the market, look for tools that are adopted by experts in your industry to make your investment count. In this way, you avoid any chances of going astray.

Scalability
The IaC tool must enable unlimited scalability for managing IT resources. Traditionally, a team's scalability is limited by the team's size, skillset, and the time it can devote to the configuration and management of infrastructure. In order to gain an edge in the modern world, the IaC tool must remove this barrier by enabling teams to configure a large number of resources very quickly. This is especially important as many IT environs today must scale up and down quickly and efficiently.

Reusability
Reusability is one of the prominent must-have features of an IaC tool. The reusability of IaC empowers developers with the ability to script once and use that code multiple times, achieving great economies of scale, efficiency, and time savings.

Now, let’s have a glance at the best infrastructure as code tools that helps DevOps teams to optimally automate infrastructure deployment and management:

The Top 10 IaC Tools To Automate Deployments in 2022

Terraform
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-a-code tool that uses Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL), which is one of the easiest IaC languages. The tool comes with a host of benefits, making it one of the most popular IaC tools. Terraform tool is multi-cloud compatible and is used for codifying the management of any cloud and on-premises resources. Simply put, you can provision, change, and version resources in any environment.

Terraform uses declarative config files to create new resources, manage the existing ones, and remove those that are unused. This open-source tool is easily readable and uses modules to easily configure your code and call your resources. Common use cases of Terraform include automate infrastructure provisioning, multi-cloud deployment, Kubernetes management, virtual machine image management, existing CI/CD workflow integration, and policy as code.

Ansible
After Terraform, Ansible is the most preferred IaC tool in the world. It is an imperative IaC tool, so it not only provisions infrastructure but also manages the configuration of the services. Ansible is a simple IT automation platform that helps automate cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and intra-service orchestration, among other IT requirements.

The IaC tool uses no agents and custom security infrastructure, making it easy to deploy. Moreover, the tool’s code is written in a very simple language YAML in the form of Ansible Playbooks, allowing users to describe their automation jobs in an easy manner. Users can also expand the features of the Ansible tool by writing custom Ansible modules and plugins.

Chef
Chef is another top IaC tool used by DevOps engineers to develop and deploy secure and scalable infrastructure automation across multi-OS, multi-cloud, on-prem, hybrid, and complex legacy architectures. This configuration management tool leverages open source community-based software development and enterprise-class support.

The Chef IaC tool uses Ruby-based DSL to create ‘recipes’ and ‘cookbooks’, which include step by step guide to achieving desired configuration stage for applications on an existing server. The tool is cloud-agnostic and is compatible with major clouds such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Some of the use cases of the Chef tool are consistent configuration, system hardening, hybrid cloud control, automated remediation, and continuous delivery pipeline automation.

Puppet
Puppet has garnered a spot in the top 10 IaC tools for the scalable approach it brings to infrastructure automation. Since 2005, Puppet’s Infrastructure as Code has helped over 40,000 organizations, including 80% of the Global 5000, to simplify the complexity of their IT infrastructure and fortify their security posture, compliance standards, and business resiliency.

Puppet IaC tool is written in Ruby-based DSL and uses a declarative approach to manage configuration on Unix and Windows operating systems. It integrates with all the leading cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware, enabling multiple cloud automation. Puppet is available in both open-source and enterprise versions.

SaltStack
Offered by VMWare, SaltStack is an open-source configuration management tool based on Python language. It is an easy-to-use IaC tool for provisioning, deploying, and configuring infrastructure on any platform at a high speed. The key selling point of this IaC tool is its remote execution engine that creates high-speed, bi-directional communication networks for a group of networks. It even comes with SSH support that can offer agentless mode. Moreover, the tool has a scheduler that enables you to schedule how often the managed servers should run your code.

The SaltStack tool enables businesses to create simple, human-readable infrastructure-as-code to provision and configure systems and software across virtualized, hybrid, and public cloud environments. You can manage and secure your infrastructure with powerful automation and orchestration. With the Salt event-driven automation engine, one can define the state of a system and auto-remediate as soon as a drift occurs.

AWS CloudFormation
CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code tool that is deeply integrated into the AWS cloud. It enables users to model, provision, and manage infrastructure and resources across all AWS accounts and regions through a single operation. One can easily code their infrastructure from scratch with the CloudFormation templates language, which is in either YAML or JSON format.

CloudFormation empowers users to easily automate, test, and deploy infrastructure templates with DevOps, and CI/CD automation. Moreover, with this IaC tool, teams can run anything from a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance to a complex multi-region application. The last piece of the puzzle is the AWS Free Tier which offers 1000 handler operations per month per account.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager
As the name suggests, Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment tool offered by Google Cloud. It automates the creation, configuration, provisioning, and management of resources on the Google Cloud Platform. This IaC tool enables users to specify all the resources needed for their application in a declarative format using YAML. Python or Jinja2 templates can also be used to specify the configuration. Moreover, it allows the reuse of common deployment paradigms such as load-balanced, auto-scaled instance groups.

With this popular IaC tool, teams can write flexible templates and configuration files for creating deployments that include a host of Google Cloud services, such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud SQL.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Microsoft has gone the extra mile to meet the evolving needs of its massive Azure customers by introducing Azure Resource Manager, infrastructure deployment, and management service. This Azure-specific IaC tool facilitates a management layer that allows users to create, update, and delete resources in their Azure account. It also offers management features, including access control, locks, and tags, to efficiently secure and organize resources after deployment. The tool also comes with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to enable users to control access to all the resources within a resource category.

With an ARM, teams can quickly redeploy their infrastructure several times throughout the application development lifecycle, while maintaining consistency in the state. Moreover, they can manage their infrastructure through declarative templates instead of scripts.

Vagrant
Developed by the same creator of Terraform, HashiCorp, Vagrant is an IaC tool most preferred by professionals using a small number of virtual machines rather than those having large cloud infrastructures.

Vagrant enables teams to build and manage VM environments in a single workflow. The easy-to-configure, reproducible, and portable work environs, controlled by a single consistent workflow, reduce development environment setup time and maximizes productivity and flexibility.

Vagrant is compatible with VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, and other cloud service platforms and can integrate with provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, and Puppet.

Pulumi
Though it is a newer IaC tool in the market, Pulumi managed to bag a spot in this list of best IaC tools because of its more modern approach to coding. In contrast to other IaC tools that use Python, YAML, JSON, or Ruby language, Pulumi uses powerful programming languages such as C++, Python, Go, and JS to code the instructions. This makes Pulumi a genuine Infrastructure as a Code tool. This IaC tool is available in open-source and enterprise versions.

How To Choose the Right IaC Tool for Your Organization

Apart from the above-listed top 10 IaC tools, there are many other IaC tools that are gaining ground in the market in recent times. With so many options available, choosing an Infrastructure as Code tool is a tough decision, which requires thought, research, along with comparing the pros and cons of various tools. So, it's imperative to take time and go through various options available and find the best tool that meets your unique business needs.

Once an IaC tool is selected, ensure that your team works automating not only the infrastructure but also the delivery process with a robust Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tool.

However…

In Reality, There Is No One-size-Fits-all IaC Tool
Though you can choose an Infrastructure as a code tool that best suits your business requirements, relying only on that one IaC tool is unwise. It is because there is no one-size-fits-all IaC tool that can completely suffice all your infrastructure needs in this ever-evolving IT world. So, in order to be future-ready and stay ahead of the dynamic infrastructure needs, businesses must rely on a set of IaC tools rather than a single tool. But there’s a catch here!

Businesses must orchestrate their choice of IaC tools to simplify and streamline the infrastructure workflow and manage tools efficiently. Without orchestrating these tools, the business may end up in the crosshairs of infrastructure management complexity.

Top Salesforce Deployment Challenges and Tips

Vishnu Vasudevan — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:42:00 +0000

As Salesforce organizations strive to improve IT delivery, making it faster, more quality-focused, and secure, they continue to face deployment challenges. Increased customer demands and high velocity releases every now and then are creating bottlenecks for Salesforce enterprises. This is where you need to recognize the Salesforce deployment challenges your team is facing and find ways to address them.

In this article, we will dive into Salesforce deployment challenges, how to orchestrate Salesforce DevOps tools, and techniques to enhance efficiency and speed while maintaining the quality and security of your applications.

The 4 Biggest Challenges in Salesforce Release

1) Unable to Keep Up With Multiple Release Cycles and On-Demand Changes
Salesforce organizations often struggle to keep up with multiple release cycles and their high velocity. This happens because Salesforce is not fully automated, making it more time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially for larger organizations. Besides, there may be overlap between different teams, causing friction points and resulting in handovers, along with longer feedback loops.

2) Complexity in Business Needs and Salesforce Ecosystem
At the core of what makes Salesforce so powerful is its low-code approach, which allows users with minimal or no coding skillset to build applications and customizations. But this comes at the expense of making source control and release management highly challenging due to its complexity.

3) Lack of Quality, Security, and Compliance
It’s difficult to move the metadata objects permission profiles, ensure both quality and security along the process, and maintain compliance in Salesforce. Security teams need to thoroughly test environments and applications to ensure they don’t overlook any vulnerabilities, issues, or bugs. However, this puts them at odds with the Salesforce teams aiming for faster release cycles. This often leads to the dev team taking security shortcuts to reduce integration issues and quickly deploy the application.

4) Lack of Visibility
“How many components have been backed up?” “What’s the status of unit testing?” “Do we have visibility into apex code scanning or testing?” Companies may have high-level visibility across different departments, but they lack end-to-end visibility into the Salesforce platform. If they have siloed visibility into their software development lifecycle, they are unlikely to maintain frequent delivery for long.

DevOps Automation for Salesforce Release: Why Do You Need It?

Salesforce organizations have been taking note of the growing trend of DevOps adoption and embracing more DevOps best practices. From changing mindset to “shift left” to taking an incremental and iterative approach to development and using automated processes to bring down manual errors, Salesforce teams are increasingly using DevOps tools and practices.

DevOps has two main aspects. First, it’s a culture, a way of working, and a mindset that truly unifies the development and operations teams. It leverages automation to empower them to collaborate better and manage releases more efficiently. Second, DevOps is a set of tools and practices that replace repetitive, time-intensive tasks with more reliable, repeatable automated ones.

“When you don't automate your Salesforce pipeline and have too many manual handoffs, people end up spending days or even weeks, depending on where they are and how they process the releases.” -Kumar Chivukula, Co-founder & CTO of Opsera

DevOps automation helps address the most pressing Salesforce release challenges. It aims for improved efficiency while maintaining the quality, security, and compliance of your applications.

It strengthens your team’s ability to build and deploy faster, solve critical issues quickly, and manage changes seamlessly. It focuses on increasing your release cadence by eliminating repetitive, manual oppressive tasks which are complex and time-intensive, leading to a tighter feedback loop.

At the same time, DevOps automation helps ensure that security and quality are baked into your software development lifecycle right from the get-go. It includes automated quality checks and security tests to identify vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle to quickly mitigate them. Fewer bugs and errors are shipped to production, all thanks to frequent and automated testing.

The Maturity Model for Salesforce DevOps: Crawl, Walk, Run

The ultimate goal of Salesforce DevOps adoption is to streamline and automate the software development lifecycle while unifying the dev and ops team. Yet, many organizations struggle to complete the full adoption journey for Salesforce DevOps from a single application level to an enterprise level.

Among our clients, those who successfully adopted DevOps took a more holistic approach spanning three layers, each with its own set of tools and measurable practices that must be streamlined and synced together.

Crawl
Enterprises often “just start with DevOps” with hand-picked tools and processes based on the idea of “start small, scale quickly” This philosophy presents a win-win situation as it aims to provide early benefits and assurance before an organization invests fully and scales their DevOps transformation.

Teams begin by deploying a few DevOps suites, selecting source code management, and starting with release management metadata. Note that there’s little automation at this point to help teams familiarize themselves with it first before deploying it on a larger scale.

Walk
The “walk” stage is the heart of Salesforce DevOps adoption. You have experimented and measured your success in the first stage and now have a way to optimize this process. Your applications are selected, tools and processes are in place, and you have a strategy to scale this further. For example, you can integrate with API connectors, like Microsoft Teams Collaboration Suite, and ITSM tools.

Another critical process here is to infuse quality, security, and compliance aspects into your software development workflow. Automated quality scans and security checks help ensure that you’re able to pick vulnerabilities early on in the development stages and reduce errors and bugs.

Run
By now, you should have end-to-end visibility of all your applications, clusters, development lifecycles, testing phases, release cycles, and any changes in the applications. Automation is one of the most critical success factors in scaling a DevOps transformation.

The best part is that DevOps expedites adoption at lower levels with standardized governance, continuous monitoring, lightweight processes, regular scans and checks, and faster release cycles. You'll be able to do the releases every hour every day, and maybe a week, depending on how you want your processes structured, without any manual intervention.

Salesforce DevOps Orchestration: Final Thoughts

When you’re adopting Salesforce DevOps, you need a well-built orchestration tool that can make the process easier and faster for your team. So, the key is to identify the right Salesforce DevOps orchestration platform that fits your needs and budget. Now, there are plenty of solutions out there in the market, but they deliver semi-automated, black box solutions, which aren’t the best when it comes to scalability, efficiency, and cost.

Most of the time, organizations approach Salesforce deployment challenges at a high level and then ask delivery teams to increase velocity. But it’s important to recognize bottlenecks in your software development pipeline and draw insights into how the entire process impacts the deployment.

Considering these Salesforce release challenges, start your journey towards DevOps adoption in stages: crawl, walk, run. Quick wins such as version-controlled code, automated release management, and small automation will help realize the value delivery of DevOps within no time.

Why You Should Stop Relying on Jenkins Plug-ins

Vishnu Vasudevan — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 17:25:16 +0000

According to ActiveState's State of CI/CD 2020 survey results, Jenkins is the most-used CI/CD tool on the market. As one of the first job runners on the market, it's had plenty of time to gain popularity and has been a crucial component in advancing the DevOps approach of building and delivering software.

Thanks to more than 1800 plug-ins, Jenkins is very easy to extend — with the right set of plug-ins, you can do pretty much anything. The plug-in library is what allows every Jenkins user to end up with a personalized experience that's largely informed by the plug-ins they installed.

Plug-ins may be at the core of Jenkins, but they also quickly become a burden for teams using Jenkins. Managing the Jenkins platform for growing teams and companies can quickly become a bottleneck, slowing you down rather than increasing your agility.

In this guide, you’ll look more at some of the disadvantages of Jenkins, as well as learn about some alternatives.

What Are Jenkins Plug-ins?

Plug-ins are so central to using Jenkins that they make their first appearance in the installation process, where you're asked to select a plug-in to start with. The default installation comes with about twenty plug-ins, plus any that you selected during installation. These plug-ins are responsible for integrating your CI/CD with external tools such as GitHub or Bitbucket for version control. Plug-ins also extended the capabilities of Jenkins and the way it works. Even the pipeline system, which orchestrates builds, is a plug-in and can be modified using other plug-ins.

You can add new plug-ins to Jenkins through the marketplace. All plug-ins in the marketplace are community-based and open source, which means anybody can create a custom plug-in that matches their needs and list it on the marketplace. Usually, there are three important things you look at when selecting a plug-in:

The popularity of the plug-in can be assessed by the number of installs
How well it's maintained, which can be estimated by looking at when the most recent update was
The dependencies required, such as other plug-ins you need to install

Why Jenkins Plug-ins Can Be Bad

While a large number of plug-ins available was once seen as an advantage for the platform, it's now often seen as a drawback or at least a source of frustration that fuels the love/hate relationship that many people have with Jenkins.

When it was first released, Jenkins felt like a wonderful self-service environment where a solid developer or team could do almost anything with the Jenkins pipelines and the right set of plug-ins. Today, however, you need real Jenkins expertise to maintain a Jenkins server, which is a disadvantage, especially when compared to newer SaaS CI/CD options on the market.

There are many recurrent issues related to the Jenkins plug-in ecosystem. The first one is the unending cycle of upgrades and dependencies. A simple project can require more than 25 different plug-ins, as every plug-in you install can install other plug-ins that are required for the first plug-in to work. This leads to a situation where you can install two plug-ins, each requiring the same third plug-in to work, and each relying on a different version of that third plug-in, leading to installation issues or bugs.

Bigger issues arise when you discover that a plug-in has a security flaw. If you discover that a plug-in is insecure or buggy, you open an issue on GitHub and wait for the plug-in to be patched, but what if the patch never comes? You can either bear with a security flaw, find a replacement plug-in and modify all your pipelines to accommodate the new plug-in, or fork the plug-in, patch it, and become the new maintainer of that plug-in. Given that new security breaches are discovered every day and plug-ins need to be patched frequently, this can quickly become a lot of work.

It also leads to yet another issue with Jenkins plug-ins. Even very popular plug-ins are often badly maintained or abandoned by the original maintainer entirely. From the perspective of the maintainers, this is totally understandable. Plug-ins are created to solve a problem, and most maintainers aren't planning to become professional plug-in maintainers on top of their job. On the user side, though, this leads to plug-ins that have poor support, because the maintainers are community members who have no obligation to maintain plug-ins indefinitely.

The last issue with Jenkins plug-ins is the lack of transparency. Without carefully examining the code, you can’t know the scope of a plug-in, and you have limited ability to limit the plug-in's access and actions on your server. Therefore, the trust factor is very important when selecting a plug-in, and you need to be careful to reduce the potential attack surface.

How Jenkins Plug-ins Affect Your Organization

When you think about using Jenkins with a single team, these issues may not seem like a huge problem. They can build their pipeline base with their favorite set of plug-ins, and assuming there are no security issues, all is well.

But when the company grows, more developers come on board, new teams are created, and there are multiple applications and services, Jenkins plug-ins don't scale well. If you let everyone use whatever plug-ins they want, you'll quickly run into dependency and upgrade issues. On the other hand, if you limit the plug-ins developers can use, you'll end up with a frustrated team and developers who feel that you're preventing them from automating tedious aspects of their workflow.

Jenkins only allowed for a single primary node, and as such, simply wasn't designed with high availability in mind. As a result of these design choices, having to restart the server to change configuration or install new plugins causes downtime and interrupts the work of everyone in your organization who relies on Jenkins. There's no easy solution to this dilemma. Creating a Jenkins server for each team would be extremely cost-inefficient and would create silos between teams. Teams with independent Jenkins servers will build incompatible pipelines based on different sets of plug-ins, setting you up for a situation where your teams can't share their automation work with each other.

You can’t allow Jenkins to be a true self-service platform, because it would be operationally complex and reduce cooperation between teams. But the biggest argument against Jenkins plug-ins is that plug-ins are a security hazard. As mentioned earlier, almost all plug-ins are community-created and supported. You need to trust that the maintainer uses security best practices, and keeps the plug-in patched against newly found vulnerabilities, which when done correctly is likely a weekly job. CI/CD platforms often have access to many systems and have the credentials needed to modify your infrastructure and interact with your production environment. This makes any CI/CD platforms a very sensitive part of your infrastructure, and security should be a top priority with these tools.

How Can You Stop Relying on Jenkins Plug-ins?

By now, you have a good understanding of some of the problems with Jenkins plug-ins. If you're thinking about moving away from them and towards a more secure infrastructure, here are some steps to take.

Carefully Curate Plug-ins
Create a shortlist of carefully selected plug-ins, and stick to those. This list should take into account both security and maintainability concerns. As a general rule, it's best to stick with plug-ins that offer integration with cloud providers such as GitHub or Amazon Web Services as they often receive strong support from the community and developers of those cloud providers. For instance, GitHub plug-in is a well-maintained plug-in you can rely on. Test new plug-ins and upgrades on a secondary Jenkins server before you run them on your primary server.

Avoid plug-ins that change the way Jenkins pipelines work because if these plug-ins break, are no longer maintained, or develop a security vulnerability, you'll need to rework your entire pipeline.

Proactively keep an eye on your plug-ins' health by checking their GitHub repository to see if they're being actively maintained; if they're not, you should be looking for a replacement. This could prevent downtime in the future when upgrading a Jenkins server, or if a security breach is discovered. Plugins are independent pieces of software with potentially exploitable vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to gain access to your build systems — and all the other parts of your system that Jenkins, out of necessity, is granted read/write access to, such as your code repository, cloud provider, and network connection. As was made obvious by the SolarWinds malware injection via build pipeline incident, the CI/CD pipeline is a trusted part of the build process, and all it takes is a snippet of malicious code to not just make your company vulnerable, but all of your clients, as well. The extreme sensitivity of this area makes plugin monitoring and curation absolutely critical.

Rely On Container-Based Steps
Container technology enables you to package environments with all their dependence. Thanks to the Docker plug-in, you can run Jenkins builds inside a Docker container. The Docker container can use an image created for the task and act as a Jenkins agent, complete with all the required dependencies for your build, eliminating the need to install plug-ins on your server.

Use Fewer Plug-ins
One of the simplest solutions to Jenkins plug-ins issues is just to use fewer plug-ins. The fewer plug-ins you use, the fewer issues you have. To achieve that, you can favor scripts over plug-ins. For example, sending a Slack notification is as simple as sending an HTTP request to an API, and allows you to avoid relying on a third-party plug-in. Scripts can be more reliable than plug-ins because you can use them locally to perform the same action. While this may seem like more work than using a plug-in, you can share your automation script across the company and use them in any pipeline without impacting the Jenkins server.

The second approach is to work as much as possible with Jenkins templates. Templates let you define reusable pieces of pipelines (jobs), and add a layer of abstraction, making it easier for developers to configure and use Jenkins. Using a template offers you an easy way to identify the plug-ins required, since the plug-ins you need are the ones referenced in the template. This gives you a place to build your pipeline collaboratively and reduce the number of plug-ins you use across your organization.

Conclusion

Jenkins and its plug-ins ecosystem can be very appealing for people looking for a CI/CD solution for their projects. However, poorly maintained plug-ins, multiple different dependencies, and security risks have soured many people on the tool.

Jenkins plug-ins management will affect your organization, and mismanaged plug-ins can put your organization at risk. It's important to implement mitigation strategies, such as minimizing the number of plug-ins by defining standard jobs or pipelines, carefully curating your plug-ins, testing plug-ins and upgrades on a separate instance, and using container-based jobs to reduce your dependency with Jenkins plug-ins.

If you're tired of being bogged down by managing your CI/CD ecosystem, including your Jenkins server, you may be interested in a no-code DevOps platform that provides integrations to replace many Jenkins plug-ins. A platform like this can also connect with your existing tools, making your team more agile and responsive, and allowing you to focus on creating great software, not managing your pipeline.

Salesforce DevOps: Keys to Productivity and Compliance

Vishnu Vasudevan — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:48:00 +0000

Companies have had to accelerate their business and evolve their Salesforce DevOps strategies in response to the pandemic. Every industry is meeting increasingly complex workflows and customer needs.

What continues to be two major focus areas in Salesforce DevOps are - productivity and compliance. But many companies - whether early in their Salesforce DevOps journey or further along - are struggling to improve their efficiency and auditing capabilities.

Challenge is that in Salesforce DevOps, your team’s ability to produce faster without compromising quality and security is what steers the ship. It’s the benchmark organizations use to identify project success ratios, analyze software delivery and team performance, and figure out the issues in their existing workflow.

Without that speed and quality and security posture, you’re stuck with inefficient workflows and systems in silos - generally not a great route to repeated success.

To help you get ahead, we’re sharing the top challenges organizations face when it comes to Salesforce DevOps and how to solve them with effective processes and tools in place - insights drawn straight from industry leaders.

Top 4 Challenges in Salesforce DevOps

Salesforce teams are taking on higher volumes of work with more dynamic needs, more responsibility, and more competition for business success. But as flexible and efficient they are, they’re still struggling to keep up. Too many teams have bloated processes that lead to lost time and energy. This directly impacts the software's release velocity, productivity, quality, and security.

To put it in context: here are the top four challenges in Salesforce DevOps.

- Aligning Release Velocity With Fast-changing Business Needs

IT teams are inundated and don’t have the capacity to keep up with rapidly dynamic demands for custom applications, especially when they’re not armed with the right applications and systems in place to support their internal functions.

Even with effective DevOps in place, the release velocity is often slower than expected because of its complexity. As a result, maximizing productivity amid rising business complexity and needs is a major challenge.

- Too Many Manual Tasks and Handoffs at Every Stage

As your IT team’s digital toolbox continues to expand, they need to perform a host of manual, repetitive tasks. For instance, developers need to build their toolchains. This includes a range of manual sub-tasks: selecting the right tools and plug-ins, integrations, licensing, and versioning.

High-volume manual tasks slow down development and lead to longer release times. Also, your software is more prone to errors and issues. Lack of automation extends far beyond missed milestones, release timelines, or even failed launches – impacting the organization at large.

- Complex Environments Make Release Management Tough

Salesforce DevOps teams work in complex environments that consist of various tools for source code management, release management, ITSM, collaboration, security, quality, visibility, and business apps. And managing a complex Salesforce org can be a daunting task.

Salesforce release management challenges include unexpected Sandbox refreshes, moving metadata between multiple environments, managing different Salesforce account types, Salesforce API version skew, and handling large numbers of metadata assets. Native tools like Change Sets, Force.com IDE, and ANT require a lot of time and aren’t the best choice to scale.

- Poor Access Management Impacts Audit and Compliance

Without proper access management in place, you run the risk of users having inappropriate access, which may lead to unauthorized activities. This can severely disrupt your business operations and even incur a financial loss. Since it also impacts the accuracy of your financial statements, auditors will certainly test your access controls.

Moreover, it’s crucial to have evidence at the right time for your auditors. Organizations that handle IAM concerns like one-off projects often face a ton of barriers not only to get their data right but to contextualize it for auditors.

According to our findings, organizations spend almost 90% of their time providing evidence for compliance in Salesforce DevOps.

How to Ensure Productivity and Compliance in Your Salesforce DevOps Journey?

When managed right, Salesforce DevOps allows companies to build better products, transform internal business processes, and produce customer value. However, bloated systems and an unorganized structure can lead to a Salesforce org misaligned with end-user needs and expectations.

Here are some proven tips to ensure productivity and compliance in your Salesforce DevOps journey:

- Adopt the Right Mindset and Tool

When answering, “Why do most Salesforce DevOps processes lack productivity and compliance?” many of the reasons can be traced back to poor mindset and tools. These are crucial parts of the software development lifecycle.

Of course, you might have DevOps tools, processes, and systems in your org, but is there a radical shift in mindset among team members? Do they have transparency in the pipeline? Do they have tools that make their work easier and let them handle complex projects seamlessly?

These are some critical questions you should ask of your Salesforce org. Having the right mindset of security and a powerful arsenal of tools can make all the difference to your release velocity, security, and quality.

One way to do this is to adopt a tool that offers accurate DevOps processes and makes it easier for teams to transition to the shift-left mindset.

- Build No-Code Pipelines

Using no-code platforms is quickly becoming the de facto methodology for quickly delivering applications in a Salesforce DevOps environment. In the early days, developers could simply write code, choose a handful of tools and build a pipeline.

However, with layers of tools, stacks, integrations, environments, and hundreds of pipelines, it’s become impossible to maintain observability throughout all the stages of the development.

Data suggests that up to 40% of a developer’s time is spent building, integrating, and maintaining pipeline tools and connections.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, 65% of all applications will use some form of low-code or no-code application development. Moreover, low-code/no-code solutions have the potential to reduce the development time by 90%.

So, your Salesforce DevOps team can instantly start building the software without worrying about learning the ropes of various tools, integrations, and pipeline-building activities.

- Unify Data and Logs From All Your Tools in a Single Dashboard

Different teams use different tools to collect their data and share their information. This leads to data fragmentation, and often teams duplicate work instead of making progress.

It’s essential to synthesize information from multiple sources, channels, tools, and platforms to make critical decisions faster. This is where a centralized platform comes in.

From a Salesforce DevOps perspective, adopting software you can extend across your applications and infrastructure stack is essential. Think of it as the hub of a wheel - it connects different tools and sources of information to help teams make better and faster decisions.

The benefits of a unified platform go beyond the direct operational needs of a Salesforce DevOps team - a unified platform is also vital for productivity and compliance. Especially in a remote, asynchronous environment, having a tool that acts as a single source of truth (SSoT) streamlines processes and keeps teams updated.

Industry leaders also say that having a consistent tool set for your IT teams is a recipe for long-term success. Without the right data accessible at the right time, it’s hard for teams to present evidence to auditors.

- Ensure End-To-End Visibility and Radical Transparency

Ever go back to pull change logs, only to see that you don’t have access to it? Not having proper access management or information about why specific changes were made doesn’t make for a very transparent development workflow.

Companies that have streamlined development processes, including visibility of project progress and data, ongoing risk management, quality, security posture, and measurement of various KPIs and metrics,
consistently meet and surpass their goals.

Finding an enabler who can help you throughout your Salesforce DevOps journey is critical to your project success and organizational milestones and goals. Or else, you constantly need your DevOps engineers, quality analysts, and security experts to learn the ropes of new tools and invest time into manual activities - that can otherwise easily be automated.

Especially when it comes to productivity and compliance - two crucial aspects of Salesforce DevOps - you need a modern orchestration platform.

Tips to Master Salesforce Release Management

Vishnu Vasudevan — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 16:33:26 +0000

Release management in Salesforce can be tricky. With the traditional approach of Salesforce release management using the Change Sets, it’s no surprise that development teams are constantly under pressure to traverse their functionalities through multiple sandboxes and deploy.

Moreover, the complex functionality, limited tools, and tight deadlines to perform deployments on production without missing a single component make Salesforce release management labor-intensive and error-prone. This often leads to frustrating issues, downtime for users, and even business impact (Agility and Velocity)

The thing is, release management doesn’t have to be challenging. While there are no hacks or quick fixes, the more you can optimize your release management process, the more you can make it efficient and deliver features and changes faster, better, and more secure.

With a no-code DevOps orchestration platform, release management is a breeze because it provides a consistent set of repeatable, reliable, and resource-independent processes for teams to accelerate end-to-end release management.

An effective release management strategy helps teams optimize the application delivery value chain, improves deployment success rates, and maximizes customer experience and cost-efficiency.

This guide will share some proven ways to improve your Salesforce release strategy: challenges with Salesforce release management, strategy for your organization, best practices, and Salesforce release management tools you need.

Challenges With Salesforce Release Management

Complex Environment
Salesforce is a comprehensive platform designed to meet the needs of a variety of companies. And while it offers some great functionalities and flexibility to the sales teams, it isn’t the easiest to use or most efficient. There’s a significant learning curve.

Developers need to understand complex and large custom objects, profiles, and permission sets and usually extract data from various Salesforce environments to release it to the production org. Repeatedly performing the entire process - adopting new tools to deploy the code manually - leads to not only slower release cycles but also increases the risk of manual errors.

Version Control
Version control is an absolute necessity for any organization. However, in Salesforce, many quirks get in the way when using version control. It doesn’t offer an easy way to access the metadata of an environment like its source code and config files for storage in a version-controlled repository.

Especially where developers are overwriting each other’s changes or sandboxes are on different Salesforce releases from one another; there’s a good chance of code conflicts leading to bugs and errors and slowing down the overall deployment process.

Change Sets
As part of the Salesforce release strategy, Salesforce change sets allow you to deploy your customizations from one environment to another. You can configure two organizations on them to send and receive changes between each other and select specific changes in the source org you want to deploy in the production org.

While they are good for quick changes and smaller organizations and early-stage companies, it is tough to scale when you have too many environments or have many Salesforce developers working on the same set of components, configuration data, packages, and software. They’re also infamous for being clunky and often do not comply with modern Salesforce release management best practices.

Since change sets do not support all Salesforce components, developers often have to perform changes manually to port functionalities from a sandbox environment to production.

Moreover, it’s a daunting task to create significant change sets. Change Sets are not user-friendly, and it is very hard for the Salesforce teams to consistently perform the deployments across multiple Salesforce orgs and environments. Developers must scroll through several hundred pages if you have thousands of components and various environments, and you can’t add different types of components simultaneously.

These challenges with change set directly increase deployment time, manual intervention, and the possibility of human error.

Dependencies on Stakeholders
For a long time, developers have understood the importance of collaborating with different business units in the company. However, with increasing customer demands, dynamic software requirements, and fast-paced development lifecycles, developers are called to collaborate with additional stakeholders.

Successful release management in Salesforce isn’t possible without true collaboration between all teams, including testing, security, and often customers. As teams grow in size and organizations get more complex, this dependency on multiple stakeholders can become extremely manual and tedious. This, in turn, compromises the project’s development speed, security and quality posture, and human errors.

Quality and Security Posture
Teams have a long list of different focus areas regarding security. From collaborating cross-functionally to understanding interconnected systems, multiple environments, and objects, and keeping pace with release timelines, teams are often stretched thin.

While Salesforce provides built-in security functionalities, they lack the levels of customization and complexity that teams may introduce while using the platform. This means that Salesforce doesn’t offer the depth and breadth you may need to analyze, measure, and mitigate risks that impact your applications or business.

Visibility
Given the complexity of the Salesforce environment, not having visibility is impacting agility, velocity, and creating efficiencies across various stages of the release management process. As per “Peter Ducket,” the world-famous management consultant, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” and this is very true for the Salesforce DevOps environment. There are multiple stages from planning to deployment, and enterprises have to find a way to measure the key metrics that can help improve the agility, velocity, security, and quality (Change Lead Time, Deployment Frequency, Mean Time to Resolution, Change Failure Rate, security and quality posture and release efficiencies by stage and goals associated with each of them, etc.).

Build the Perfect Salesforce Release Strategy for Your Org

A Salesforce release strategy is a series of stages to guide when and where changes are made from one Salesforce organization to another. Whether your team is moving changes from a developer sandbox to integration testing or from security testing to production, a Salesforce release process provides a framework to streamline release management and help you make informed decisions to accelerate your deployment.

To improve the quality and security of the releases, reduce bugs in production, and match speed to market demands, Salesforce teams are increasingly turning to DevOps tools and practices.

According to a report by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud, “high-performing software teams use DevOps to release 46 times faster”. Additionally, these teams have much lower change failure rates and faster incident recovery times.

DevOps helps push Salesforce teams forward to work cross-functionally and deploy changes in the most effective and efficient way possible.

A key element that fuels Salesforce DevOps is automation - it reduces manual, time-intensive tasks, speeds up releases, and boosts team collaboration. Salesforce DevOps orchestration tools empower developers and software teams to benefit from features like no-code pipeline builder, automated toolchain configuration, aggregated and contextual logs, and provide end-to-end visibility across your release management software and improve the agility, velocity and security, and quality posture.

Top 5 Salesforce Release Management Best Practices

Digital business has created a new ecosystem where releases are expected at lightning speed without compromising business capabilities and security.

1. Build a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) For Centralized Intakes
In Salesforce release management, there are many moving pieces; source code, user interface, access control rights, static and dynamic components, and more. Software teams often use various solutions and platforms to ensure smooth release management.

The problem is, as the complexity of the project increases, the number of tools also tends to increase - which becomes quite overwhelming to track.

A good way to streamline your Salesforce release process is to build a single source of truth. Teams can synthesize information from various solutions and platforms into a central place. This not only accelerates release management but also avoids work duplication, and creates a standardized knowledge hub for your team, so it’s easier for them to scale.

Start by documenting your Salesforce deployment process. From configuration settings to training materials to test plans, everything should be well-organized in a single source of truth. This SSOT will serve as a handy reference for your team members should they encounter any challenges in the Salesforce deployment.

Moreover, business and IT teams can collaborate and have a regular cadence to discuss the feasibility, impact, and ROI of changes. This enables the entire team to have visibility into the features and changes requested by the business.

2. Have Version Control Systems (VCS) In Place
Migrating changes to production is a repetitive process that often takes place in the testing and staging environment. While your team may conduct various tests to ensure these changes are in sync with your code’s functionality, quality, and security, it’s important to have your safety net in case things fall out. That’s where Version Control Systems (VCS) come in.

VCS tools (GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc.) provide a full audit trail of changes made to your production, so tracing back to errors and issues becomes much easier and faster. This also helps maintain SOX compliance. Further, it’s a reliable automated solution that identifies and alerts you for any possible security or quality conflicts that your team might have missed during testing.

Overall, a Version Control System helps you build a rollback strategy that ensures your CI build doesn’t break when developers make changes in the production environment.

3. Test, Test, Test
Testing quickly becomes an exhaustive process if your software is too large or complicated. Even when rolling out new features or product upgrades, it’s crucial to test all aspects - functionality, quality, and security - before pushing them into the final deployment stage. However, manual testing is prone to human errors, and if detected later, it can impact your business value and even customers in real-time. One of the most efficient ways to perform rigorous testing is by investing in an automation tool that comes with built-in security and quality gates to assess your software.

4. Create a Comprehensive Release Management Strategy
A solid Salesforce release management strategy should take into account multiple factors: team structure, technology and infrastructure, best practices, and change management process. If you already have a Salesforce release process in place, you might want to move backward and assess these factors step-by-step. Or, you can create one from scratch using these tips:

Use an orchestration platform that does the heavy lifting for your team while it focuses on accelerating releases.
Aim for smaller, faster releases. Instead of working on extensive and lengthy projects, consider working in an agile manner with small sprints. This will help take off some of the pressure on the software team, allow them to be more focused on specific features and modifications, and ensure continuous business value delivery.
Make sure you have different teams take care of different segments of your release. For instance, your business self-service team can manage users, data, page layouts, and user-based permissions. On the other hand, your IT team can manage more complex tasks like managing integrations and interdependencies.

5. Practice Good Compliance and Governance

In Salesforce development, different projects may have different release management processes.

Moreover, while Salesforce APIs support most metadata components, there are a few exceptions. In such cases, it’s crucial for developers to document all the manual steps needed for the release process to eliminate any ambiguity and ensure it’s deployed in a safe way. Otherwise, Salesforce teams run the risk of a huge failure in governance.

To ensure that your Salesforce release management strategy follows good governance, it’s necessary to standardize and streamline the process across different projects, teams, and divisions. Implementing industry best practices in your Salesforce org ensures that everyone across your org has proper user-based access controls and reduces disruption and downtime.

Get On Top of Salesforce Release Management

In this guide, we talked about the most critical Salesforce release management challenges that companies face and the best practices that businesses and teams of any size can adopt. It’s not uncommon to see companies take several years to focus on their Salesforce release process and solidify it.

When it comes to DevOps in Salesforce release management, it's important to have a platform with a source of truth, user-based access controls, automated toolchains, end-to-end visibility, and more.

DevOps Maturity Model: Trends and Best Practices in Today’s World

Vishnu Vasudevan — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:46:41 +0000

Innovation is critical to driving an organization's growth. Once leaders in their industries, companies like Nokia, Kodak, and Blockbuster failed to innovate and soon lost most market share.

Consumers want quicker, better, and more affordable solutions to their problems. You should have systems in place to launch your products in the market as soon as possible — without compromising the quality.

DevOps is one such process for innovation in the IT industry. It is a methodology that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between the originally siloed development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. Implementing DevOps can reduce friction between groups and empower businesses to launch software products faster.

But many businesses are still in the nascent stage of implementing it effectively.

Achieving DevOps maturity is a journey, not a destination. And organizations need to identify where they are in this expedition.

Let's discuss how DevOps Maturity Model can help organizations evaluate their software delivery processes and implement DevOps practices faster.

What Is the DevOps Maturity Model?

The DevOps maturity model provides a scale for evaluating and measuring the maturity level of an organization's DevOps capabilities. It focuses on the challenges of implementing technology and cultural changes and the opportunities provided by new approaches.

It helps organizations become more effective at bringing software to market on schedule, within budget, and of course, with high quality. The more capabilities and skills an organization has, the better it can handle issues of scale and complications.

The model is useful when working with an entire organization but can also apply to specific technical teams. Companies use it to map their current DevOps state and document the route to the desired state.

Phases of DevOps Maturity

The DevOps approach provides development teams with the tools and processes they need to deploy new features in production quickly, reliably, and repeatedly. It has been around for several years but has been gaining more and more attention lately.

There are no standard phases of DevOps maturity, but most variations stem from the same core principles. Each stage represents a progressive increase in maturity.

The first stage is a traditionally siloed organizational structure with outdated processes, extensive manual work, and high outages. It reaches the final phase when an organization successfully optimizes its DevOps capabilities across the culture, processes, and tools.

One way of looking at DevOps maturity is by categorizing your processes within the stages given below.

- Phase 0: Disorganized — No DevOps process is in place, or the management has no idea how beneficial automation and integration are. Development and operations teams work independently, and the software is tested manually. Desired changes take a long time to go into production.
- Phase 1: Structured — Some processes are put in place, but they are very loosely defined, and there is little or no automation. Companies in this phase experiment with DevOps practices on small teams before scaling it to larger IT projects.
- Phase 2: Managed — A more mature process is defined, including automation for some essential tasks. Agile practices are widely adopted in the development and operations sectors.
- Phase 3: Measured — Teams have a strong understanding of DevOps practices, and automation replaces most manual processes. Agile performance metrics are defined and incorporated into the process. Performance information is gathered via automation and fed back into the process to drive improvements.
- Phase 4: Optimized — The focus in this phase is continuous improvement, and DevOps processes are entrenched across teams. You are running experiments across different parts of your architecture and using insights gained from your data to make changes and improve performance.

After identifying your organization's maturity phase, you can create a road map for the future.

DevOps Maturity Assessment Models

Many DevOps maturity models are available in the market, each defining slightly different maturity levels or progress. These models can help organizations self-assess their current state of DevOps maturity and benchmark against industry standards.

Some models also provide actionable steps that organizations can use, no matter their size or the complexity of their environment. Maturity models also may include continuous improvement processes that any organization can apply.

Where Does Your Organization Stand?

If you've been practicing DevOps for a while, it might be time to assess your maturity level.

Mature DevOps environments have efficient teams, which can deliver high-quality software products at a rapid pace. Many DevOps teams are working hard to improve their processes, but how can they know if they are doing well?

How mature are you in the DevOps value stream? Asking this question will help you identify weaknesses and determine areas where you need to focus your efforts.

But not everyone has to struggle with self-assessment of their DevOps maturity. Many DevOps maturity assessment tools can take this burden off your shoulders.

Here are some DevOps maturity assessment models:

Trends in DevOps Maturity

Whether you're just beginning down the DevOps path or have hit a plateau in your development process, let's look at how things change nowadays.

The IT world is changing at a breakneck pace. The old way of doing things won't cut it for long. The days where you could get away with putting yourself in a corner and coming out to update the servers weekly are over. The adoption rate of DevOps is accelerating.

As per GitLab's 2021 DevSecOps survey, there has been a sharp increase in release cadences, continuous deployments, automation, and security postures. The dependence on cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning has also grown.

Here are some more statistics from the study to ponder:

More than half of the total developers in the survey are releasing code 2x faster than earlier.
The percentage of security pros who rated their organizations’ security efforts as “good” or “strong” in 2020 is up from 13% to 72%.
The percentage of ops team members who said they are “fully” or mostly automated is up by 10% from 2020.
Almost a quarter of respondents have full test automation — up 13% from 2020.
Use of or plans for using AI/ML or bots for test/code review saw a massive increase of 41% from 2020.

Some companies implement DevOps far more effectively than others. Some don't even know they should be doing it at all! We all face the same question: How can we learn to "do DevOps better?" That's where the DevOps maturity model comes into play. It gives you direction by identifying the maturity stage you fall in and what the next steps are.

DevSecOps: Best Practices for CI/CD Pipeline Security

Vishnu Vasudevan — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 17:33:09 +0000

CI/CD pipeline refers to a series of sequential practices comprising Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment and/or Continuous Deployment (CD). Commonly utilized by DevOps teams, the CI/CD pipeline is one of the most efficient methods to build, test and deploy code, largely via automation tools.

Leveraging CI/CD pipeline has been reliably provided to facilitate the construction and deployment of more updates (and better ones) to software. This is largely because successful CI/CD pipelines require consistent collaboration and honest implementation of Agile and DevOps principles.

Why DevSecOps for CI/CD Pipelines Should Be a Top Priority

To start with, DevSecOps a.k.a Development, Security and Operations is a procedural approach to development, automation, and platform architecture that prioritizes security in every level of decision-making in the IT lifecycle.

Not only do security vulnerabilities put sensitive data at risk, but they are also expensive to fix. In 2020, the average cost of a data breach was $3.86 million. By the end of 2021, the costs of dealing with cybercrime were expected to reach close to $6 trillion. Ninety percent of web apps are assumed to be unsafe, especially via hacking. Sixty-eight percent of them are presumed to be vulnerable to data breaches. On top of that, there were more than 1,000 data breaches in the U.S. alone in 2020, which impacted over 155 million people.

Naturally, security must necessarily be a priority for DevOps and Agile teams. In fact, a DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline is meant to be a natural extension of DevOps principles, incorporating a layer of security implementation in the existing development process.

At a high level, the following steps are involved in DevSecOps-based pipelines:

Identify security issues (and hopefully solve them) early in the development cycle. This is best done when teams can independently, with minimal friction, perform security-related testing and tasks within the development pipeline.
It is best to integrate security-related objectives before coding begins. Incorporate threat modeling when conceptualizing the system. Aim to put linters and static analysis in place so that they can eliminate manageable issues early on.
Use software composition analysis to verify that open-source dependencies carry accurate and compatible licenses, and are all clear of vulnerabilities.
When code is pushed to the pipeline, use Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to locate weaknesses and perform another layer of software composition analysis. It is best to incorporate SAST tools into the automation pipeline, so that, after each new commit, new code is scanned for errors and exposures.
Once builds are completed, leverage security integration tests. Consider executing this code in an isolated container equipped to test input validation, network calls, and authorization processes.
Move on to testing access controls and logging protocols. Ensure that access is limited to only the relevant user subset and that the software logs necessary security and performance metrics accurately, every time.
Set up security tests to continue running post-production. Automate patching and configuration management so that the software has access to the latest and most secure versions of all its dependencies.

A DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline blends security objectives and measures into every stage. By leveraging automated tools, it allows rapid product delivery without compromising data defense and safety measures.

Best Practices for CI/CD Pipeline Security

Implement the following CI/CD pipeline security best practices to ensure data safety, the authenticity of processes and get the best out of DevSecOps practices.

1. Start With Research
Before writing a single line of code, identify key threats to the security of the pipeline and the software being developed. Locate the junctures at which additional security might be necessary, conduct threat modeling, and keep a close eye on security updates and verification protocols.

Generally, any point at which the pipeline connects to a third-party tool/framework/facilitator will be prone to threat. Ensure that security patches are installed and updated regularly. Block all devices and connecting software that does not meet security benchmarks.

2. Implement Rigorous Access Parameters
Ensure that everyone accessing the pipeline is sufficiently authenticated. Measures like one-time passwords and authenticators should be mandatory for human agents participating in the pipeline’s process.

When it comes to securing non-human access to the pipeline, i.e. access required by third-party automation tools and frameworks, evaluating machine identity is also important. Use authenticators to verify that the attributes of a container (requesting access to the pipeline) match the attributes previously specified to the pipeline’s recognition systems.

Destroy all containers and virtual machines after they have served their purpose.

3. Be Cautious With Offering Access
Be consistently aware of which individuals have access to which levels of the pipeline’s functionality. Divide and distinguish access levels based on individual roles, time of access or specific tasks. Maintain a comprehensive database for access management, and ensure that information is segmented based on access level. This is one of the most effective CI/CD security best practices that can be applied via intelligent team management.

Implement 'Least Privilege' as a Practice
The practice of least privilege entails giving access to only the information that is needed for a particular role or task. In other words, an individual is given access to a restrictive dataset and section of the CI/CD pipeline - as much as is required to accomplish tasks or goals assigned to them.

The practice should also extend to connected systems, devices, and applications as they require permission and varying levels to access to get things done. Make sure to regularly survey and review access levels to fortify the least privilege and keep the ecosystem safe.

4. Keep Your Git Secure
For obvious reasons, Git is heavily targeted by hackers and other security threats. Every developer and tester in a project must be thoroughly educated on how to safely use Git, avoid common security pitfalls, and best practices to safeguard code on Git.

Remember to leverage the .gitignore file to avoid accidentally committing generated and standard caches files. As part of your larger backup mechanism, implement and use a locally stored and secure backup repository.

Conclusion

Incorporating DevSecOps into a development pipeline can be fairly complex, especially for a team new to the approach. In fact, without the right approach to adoption, friction is a real possibility within the team.

Start with assorting the entire adoption process into small, achievable steps. This will allow teams and stakeholders to get acquainted with DevSecOps tools, principles, and practices, thus bringing about a change in team culture and individual mindset.

Ace Your DevOps Game With This Ultimate List of Plugins in Jenkins

Vishnu Vasudevan — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 16:58:16 +0000

In recent years, DevOps has established itself as a formidable force in the software world. By bridging the gap between development and IT operations teams, DevOps has brought speed, efficiency, and quality to software development. It enabled IT businesses to adopt agile software delivery methodologies like Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

However, despite gaining universal popularity, the road to successful DevOps adoption remained bumpy. Many organizations struggle to implement optimal automation across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from build, integration, and testing to delivery and deployment. Consequently, harnessing the full potential of the CI/CD pipeline remained elusive. At this juncture, Jenkins has emerged as an indispensable tool to help DevOps teams achieve automation goals.

So, What Is Jenkins?

Jenkins is the most popular open-source automation server available in the market. It facilitates continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) in software development by imbibing automation across build, test, and deployment.

As a robust automation server, Jenkins can be leveraged as a simple CI servicer or used as a CD hub for any software project. Implementing CI/CD through Jenkins enables developers to ensure a high level of code quality and successful builds. It also empowers DevOps teams to rapidly identify and rectify issues. For instance, if a code commit introduces a flaw into the build, Jenkins not only helps in identifying it immediately but also in knowing which code caused the issue. The sub-optimal code can then be isolated, rectified, and recommitted swiftly.

In a nutshell, Jenkins helps automate any of the phases of SDLC, from development to deployment and monitoring.

Apart from these enticing benefits, the primary USP that drives the demand for Jenkins is its extensive list of plugins. With over 1800 community-contributed plugins, Jenkins has gone the extra mile to cater to the evolving needs of the DevOps ecosystem. So, what are plugins? What benefits do they offer? Let’s look into it!

What Are Plugins in Jenkins?

By default, Jenkins comes with a finite number of features. It may not integrate with every tool used in the SDLC. Here comes the role of plugins.

Plugins extend the functionalities and capabilities of Jenkins to make it suitable for all user-specific needs. These plugins encompass source code management, administration, platforms, UI/UX, building management, and much more. They help Jenkins integrate with practically every tool in the CI/CD toolchain.

For instance, if you want to integrate Jenkins with version control tools like Git, plugins related to Git let you do that. On the other hand, for integration with tools like Maven, Amazon EC2, respective plugins must be installed in your Jenkins.

However, with a plethora of plugins present, it could be a herculean task for choosing which plugins to use. Selecting the best plugins, especially when each one is unique and excellent in its own way, is arduous. Browsing through all 1800+ plugins will be a tough row to hoe. Fret not! We are here to help you choose the best Jenkins plugins for DevOps.

Our DevOps experts have carefully curated a list of the top 10 Jenkins plugins that should be on your radar in 2022. Read on to know how you can orchestrate them for continuous integration:

Top 10 Best Jenkins Plugins for DevOps

1) Git Plugin for Jenkins
Among the extensive list of plugins for Jenkins, the Git plugin holds a prominent position. As the name suggests, it facilitates essential git functions for Jenkins projects. It offers Git operations such as pulling, fetching, checking out, branching, listing, merging, tagging, and pushing repositories. Git plugin has the functionality, performance, security, and flexibility that the DevOps teams need.

It serves as a Distributed Version Control DevOps tool that supports distributed non-linear workflows by providing data assurance for developing quality software. Moreover, it enables access to GitHub as a Source Code Management (SCM) system, which acts as a repository browser for many other providers.

Plugin Link

2) Jira Plugin for Jenkins
Jira plugin is one of the most popular and sought-after ticketing tools. It is an open-source plugin that integrates Jenkins with the Atlassian Jira Software (both Cloud and Server versions), enabling the DevOps teams more visibility into the development pipeline. This plugin also allows you to display builds inside Jira, automatically send data about builds and developments from Jenkins to Jira, and track Jira issues in Jenkins, among other vital functions.

However, one ought to use a Jira service account instead of a personal account for leveraging the Jira plugin.

In order to configure the Jira plugin, one must add Jira sites in Jenkins, then the plugin will automatically hyperlink all the corresponding issue names to Jira.

Plugin Link

3) Kubernetes Plugin for Jenkins
It is no surprise that the Kubernetes plugin holds a spot in the list of plugins for Jenkins. However, running multiple projects simultaneously on Jenkins can be a tough row to hoe as it doesn’t facilitate great server scalability. This is where the Kubernetes plugin comes in.

This plugin integrates Jenkins with Kubernetes. It enables developers to automate the scaling process of running Jenkins slaves in the Kubernetes environment.

This plugin integrates Jenkins with Kubernetes. It enables developers to automate the scaling process of running Jenkins slaves in the Kubernetes environment. It is excellent for running dynamic agents on the Kubernetes clusters. More importantly, it dynamically creates Kubernetes Pods for each agent defined by the Docker image to run and terminate it after the build is completed.

To configure this free plugin, one must add the Kubernetes cluster in the Jenkins configurations. Then, navigate to Manage Jenkins -> Configure System -> Cloud -> Kubernetes to set up this plugin. In fact, if Jenkins is running on the cluster, the default configuration values can be used.

Plugin Link

4) SonarQube Plugin for Jenkins
SonarQube plugin enables easy integration of SonarQube with Jenkins. SonarQube is the open-source tool for Continuous Inspection of code quality. So, the SonarQube plugin helps DevOps teams to identify bugs, vulnerabilities, and duplication and ensure code quality before building code automatically with Jenkins. In addition, the integration enables you to analyze the code when you run a job that contains SonarQube execution within it. It also generates an analysis of that code in the SonarQube Server.

Navigate to Manage Jenkins –> Manage Plugins > Available –> SonarQube to install the SonarQube plugin. Moreover, include credentials plugins to store your credentials in Jenkins.

Plugin Link

5) Docker Plugin for Jenkins
Docker plugin is one of the top Jenkins plugins for enhancing DevOps. This plugin allows one to spawn Docker containers and run builds on them automatically. With this plugin, DevOps teams can use a Docker host to dynamically provision a docker container as a Jenkins agent node that runs a single build. The node can be terminated without the build process needing any awareness of Docker.

Jenkins can be configured with knowledge of one or more docker hosts and templates. Then, it can run Docker containers to offer Jenkins Nodes on which Jenkins can run builds.

Plugin Link

6) Maven Integration Plugin for Jenkins
Although Jenkins has in-built support for Maven, it still lacks advanced integration features. Maven Integration plugin does the needful. This plugin offers advanced integration of Maven 2/3 projects with Jenkins. The functionalities of this plugin are as follows:

Automatic configuration of reporting plugins such as Junit and Findbugs
Automatic triggering across jobs on the basis of SNAPSHOTs published or consumed
Incremental builds
Parallel build modules on multiple executors or nodes
Post-build deployment of binaries, if all tests are passed, and the project is succeeded

To install the Maven Integration plugin, go to Manage Jenkins -> Select Manage Plugins -> Available -> Maven Integration plugin.

Plugin Link

7) Amazon EC2 Plugin for Jenkins
Amazon EC2 plugin enables Jenkins to initiate agents on EC2 (or Eucalyptus) and terminate when they get obsolete. When the build cluster is overburdened, Jenkins – with this plugin - starts instances using the EC2 API and connects them as Jenkins agents. The excess EC2 instances will be killed once the load becomes normal. In this way, the DevOps teams can maintain an in-house cluster, then move the excess build/test loads into EC2. Moreover, this plugin helps in copying artifacts and managing the load for Jenkins.

To install this plugin, go to Manage Plugins -> Available -> Amazon EC2 -> Download now and install after restart. Once the installation is complete, restart Jenkins.

Plugin Link

8) Build Pipeline Plugin for Jenkins
Build Pipeline plugin is another interesting Jenkins plugin that secured a spot in the top 10 list. It allows DevOps teams to view all the upstream and downstream connected jobs within the build pipeline. With this plugin, manual triggers can be defined for jobs that need intervention before execution. The Build Pipeline plugin also helps you view the history of pipelines, the present status, and where each version got into the chain based on its revision number in VCS.

To install the build pipeline plugin, go to Jenkins -> Manage Jenkins -> Build Pipeline Plugin.

Plugin Link

9) Blue Ocean Plugin for Jenkins
Blue Ocean Plugin is one of the few Jenkins plugins that enticed the DevOps ecosystem with unique features. Designed for Jenkins Pipelines, this plugin enhances user experience by axing clutter and improving visibility. The following are the key features offered by the Blue Ocean plugin:

Deep visibility into CD pipelines for the swift understanding of software pipeline status
Guiding the users to develop a pipeline and making automating CD pipelines approachable
Customizing Jenkins UI on par with the needs of DevOps teams
Accurate detailing of where in the pipeline issues sprout, thereby facilitating swift response and increased productivity
Maximizing DevOps teams’ productivity by facilitating native integration for branch and pull requests

To install the Blue Ocean plugin, navigate to Manage Jenkins -> Manage Plugins -> Blue Ocean plugin.

Plugin Link

10) Mailer Plugin for Jenkins
The final plugin in the list of the best 10 Jenkins plugins is here. The mailer plugin enables the DevOps teams to configure email notifications and alerts for build results. In addition, the plugin offers some advanced options for configuration such as SMTP authentication, SSL, TLS, SMPT Port, Reply-To Address, and Charset.

Plugin Link

Troubleshooting: What To Do if Jenkins Plugins Are Not Installing?

While installing Jenkins plugins, you may often encounter installation troubles. Some of the common Jenkins plugins installation problems are given below:

The Jenkins Plugin Is Abnormal During Initialization
There may be two common reasons for this issue:

1) The Jenkins version is outdated, and the particular plugin cannot be used.

2) The plugin cannot be installed due to network or wall problems.

In the first case, you must download the latest Jenkins version and, in the second instance, change the plugin proxy source.

The Plugin Cannot Be Found, or the Installation Fails
The reasons for this issue are the same as the above one. In this case, you must manually download relevant plugins from the Jenkins plugin's official website. After the download is complete, you can upload it manually.

These are just a couple of issues DevOps teams face while installing Jenkins plugins. However, with so many plugins required for seamless DevOps workflow, one may unwittingly find themselves in the crosshairs of installation issues.

How To Integrate Security Into the DevOps Toolchain

Vishnu Vasudevan — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 16:42:00 +0000

Traditional Security Conundrum in DevOps

DevOps tactics and tools are significantly transforming the way businesses innovate. However, amidst this transformation, IT decision-makers are cognizing that traditional ‘siloed’ security approaches are hampering organizations from realizing the full potential of DevOps. In fact, the conventional security methods and controls are perceived as inhibitors to speed, agility, and scalability offered by DevOps.

Baking Security into DevOps
In response, forward-thinking and fortune 500 companies have started integrating security practices and controls into each phase of the DevOps software development lifecycle, a methodology popularly known as DevSecOps. It integrates security practices and procedures into DevOps tools and underlying policies, making security an integral part of software development. As DevSecOps gathers steam, IT firms are more likely to blend vulnerability assessment, risk modeling, and security automation into DevOps processes and toolchains. As a result, it improves security and compliance maturity levels of the DevOps pipeline and toolchain, while enhancing product quality and delivery. How? DevSecOps enables seamless flow of application changes through DevOps pipelines, bestowing on the developers the authority and autonomy, without axing security or increasing risk.

The foremost value proposition of a DevOps toolchain is speed-to-market. Organizations that fail to embed security into their DevOps toolchain are at the risk of leaving much of its potential on the table. Every software product you develop should be tested, secure, and reliable. Your DevOps team should not be wasting time scuffling with cyber risks, nor should your customers. It's high time to stop the patch management game with security.

As the trend is only starting to gain momentum, DevOps organizations must act swiftly to explore DevSecOps opportunities and steer through the cyber world effectively.

Securing the DevOps Toolchain
DevSecOps is not a security trend by itself. Instead, it is an aspect of the ongoing DevOps revolution. DevSecOps is more of a cultural transformation than a cluster of tools and processes. It enables enterprises leveraging DevOps to think about security differently. Let’s dive deep into the characteristics of DevSecOps and understand how it is different from the way you are approaching security in your DevOps pipeline so far:

The DevSecOps Mindset and Salient Features

Shared Objectives - DevSecOps sets common goals and standards for determining success. It collaborates with security architects and prioritizes tasks on par with the business objectives.

Prioritizing Security - With its consumable, self-service security capabilities, DevSecOps can erect a robust security fence, enabling teams to monitor the DevOps pipeline and provide precise feedback. This makes it possible for teams to identify security vulnerabilities in the software development cycle, significantly axing the need for rework before or after deployment.

Automation - By automating, manual, error-prone, repetitive processes, DevSecOps can orchestrate an integrated process flow, without compromising security and elevating risks. It can integrate preventive operational controls and ongoing audit trails.

Operational Insights and Threat Intelligence - Businesses embedding security into their DevOps toolchain can elicit operational insights and threat intelligence, which enable the teams to drive application development process flow while prioritizing security recommendations. The teams no longer have to depend solely on code scanning, they can now take a more risk-based approach to testing.

Holistic Security - DevSecOps helps in creating an integrated framework for securing both the pipeline and application. This, in turn, helps organizations in building holistic, end-to-end security throughout the production environment.

Proactive Threat Monitoring - DevSecOps promotes automated, continuous testing, which helps teams to identify vulnerabilities before they become business risks.

Security-as-a-Code - As there will be only limited visibility into some aspects of operations security, CIOs handling security audits often assume that security teams have accomplished their tasks accurately. Security-as-a-Code (SaaC) can offer a more effective approach. It is one of the two key elements of DevSecOps. SaaC is referred to as embedding security into DevOps tools and practices, making it an essential component of the toolchains and workflows.

It increases collaboration between development and security teams, eliminating the need for manual security activities, decreasing defect costs, and maintaining consistent quality throughout the pipeline.

Infrastructure-as-a-Code - When security operations comprise human intervention, the process of threat detection and response can take hours or even days. This can be averted by Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC), which is the second key element of DevSecOps. The engineered response capabilities in the IaaC environments can swiftly redirect traffic, alert the security team, and dole out fresh instances, all automatically.

Improved Collaboration - Like DevOps, DevSecOps methodology also promotes seamless communication and collaboration for improved speed to market. Robust feedback loops that offer regular and reliable reports play a crucial role in successful security implementation.

Developers as Security Proponents - The DevSecOps methodology prompts developers to take ownership of security for the code they build. Security teams, who draft security policies and strategies for the entire organization, often train software programmers and architects and equip them with the right tools. A cultural shift to make security as a responsibility of the whole organization is required.

Continuous Monitoring and Auditing - Auditing code is fully automated through scripts, composition analysis, and static and dynamic analysis, among others. In contrast, security codes are reviewed staunchly through manual and automated processes. While alerts and dashboards drive continuous monitoring, automation enables real-time remediation.

Defined Incident Response - DevSecOps clearly defines the security practices and responsibilities that the organization's employees must follow before, during, and after a security incident. This allows the teams to act swiftly, identify the root cause, and implement appropriate response mechanisms and preventive measures.

These DevSecOps features can help organizations enhance overall security posture, reduce compliance issues, and improve productivity. Importantly, they can do away with the impediments the traditional security brings along in high-velocity development environments, thus unleashing DevOps' full potential.

Best Practices for Implementing a Secure DevOps Toolchain

- Optimize DevOps performance with the right tools

A good DevOps strategy requires forging a robust pipeline that promotes the culture of security, besides getting buy-in from stakeholders. Automation tools make this possible as they need little-to-no human interference while helping you meet DevOps objectives. These tools also minimize manual errors and ensure that compliance is addressed.

Some of these tools are Team city for continuous delivery, Burp for vulnerability testing, Sonar Qube for static analysis, and Selenium Grid for dynamic analysis, among others. Choose the set of tools that best suits your DevOps needs. However, connecting all these tools together in a secure system is imperative.

- Assess manual testing processes

DevOps has outperformed traditional development and deployment pipelines, facilitating frequent features releases and faster iteration times. However, organizations that are relying on DevOps are ought to consider that as they deliver new features to their users at an unprecedented pace, they need to ensure that they aren’t spawning new security vulnerabilities at the same speed. Automate security checks, like code analysis for your own code and third-party packages and scanning of your systems.

Ensure that architectural changes are reviewed and approved meticulously, which requires manual intervention. Simply put, you need to know when to rope in manual security and testing strategies into the process. It is wise to let the whole team know when to do so.

- Implement the concept of shift-left security

Developing and delivering secure, vulnerable-free applications is an effort that demands the involvement of everyone, from development to operations to support. The concept of shifting-left security empowers everyone to include security culture from the early stages of planning, to development, and to the deployment of an application. A strong DevSecOps requires shifting security practices to the left of the product development lifecycle and integrating them into each stage of development.

This makes identifying and addressing security issues easier and more cost-effective than the traditional, more reactive security practices. This shift-left approach involves security at the onset of the development process. It empowers the development team with robust tools to find and fix security issues and ensures that only secure commits are ultimately pushed to the code repository.

- Leverage automation to monitor compliance, security processes, and policies

When embedding security into the DevOps toolchain, it's imperative to deploy automated mechanisms that will monitor compliance and security processes and policies that have been implemented.

DevOps teams have huge potential, but studies reveal that teams spend over 50% of their time on repetitive tasks that can be automated, such as best practice configuration, monitoring, and system installation. Automation alleviates these tedious, repetitive tasks and the DevOps team can focus on more valuable tasks like root cause analysis, improving systems and processes, and knowledge sharing.

For instance, after an SAP upgrade, the team may often consider the default password, practically putting the system at risk. Leveraging an automated salutation that will alert the DevOps team in real-time on such cases will ax the risk.

- Ax the gap between DevOps and security teams

Security teams often don’t understand how the automated software development pipelines work, and why they are paramount for DevOps success. Traditionally, security is considered as an impediment to software development, but in DevSecOps culture the whole team can be an integral component of the automated process. Development and operation teams aspire to achieve speed to market but lack knowledge about the application and network security. As security shifts left of the product development cycle, it can be initially alarming for the DevOps teams to take responsibility for the security of applications.

To achieve seamless collaboration between DevOps and Security, the security teams must gain knowledge about various methods for deploying apps using Docker and Kubernetes. Likewise, DevOps teams must learn basics about network and application security and know-how to provide how to achieve security within a container pipeline process.

- Automate!

To successfully embed security into the DevOps toolchain, the DevOps teams must ensure that the security practices are automated, beginning from the planning stage of the project. Dynamic application security testing, static application security testing, and any other security test in place must be automated.

This can be achieved without any need for additional security specialists. However, the organization must provide appropriate security training for the development and operation team members. Moreover, the responsibility of security must be shared between them. For instance, the developers should be asked to ensure the code security, while the Ops teams members take care of the infrastructure-as-a-code and endpoint protection.

- Strive for cyber resilience

In the present fast-paced digital world, software applications must be developed and delivered at speed, but with minimal security vulnerabilities. This can be achieved by leveraging automated binary security. This approach can be applied to the cloud as well as the container orchestration tools. In the present day’s highly interconnected internet world, it is highly likely that networks will be breached. Thus, organizations must deploy tools that scramble binaries, change the code layout, and randomize each function in the build toolchain that can protect your business from cyberattacks.

Fusing automation and security is the key in realizing cyber resilience as it:
Promotes proactive security approach instead of reactive remediation after an incident
Enables early detection and remediation of security issues earlier in the development process, thereby trimming the expenses
Integrates security across the entire continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline
Facilitates fast and efficient deliver
Enables compliance at scale

For instance, organizations can implement Runtime Application Self Protection (RASP). RASP is a security tech that relies on runtime instrumentation to identify and restrict breaches. This method seals the gap left by application and network security, neither of which have adequate abilities to restrict vulnerabilities from shrouding in the review process or prevent new threats.

- Security and coding must go hand in hand

The migration to the cloud makes application development and management quite easy and efficient. However, it also brings new security challenges. Traditionally, developers used to develop applications and push them to AppSec teams for testing and clearance, which slowed the deployment process. But in the speed-driven world, it's no longer viable for organizations to wait for AppSec to speed up testing, while not compromising on security. The serverless technologies have transformed AppDev Practices and it is imperative for security teams to know code in order to stay relevant.

Security teams must engage with the application, not avoid it. They should understand how the application works, so they can secure it from risks. Security teams must know the ramification of designs and the choice of programming language. They are ought to work alongside developers to do security code reviews. Based on this information, they should properly configure security tools, prioritize risks based on their severity and location in code.

Simply put, security must go hand in hand with code. Security must become code-centric to make it more effective.

- Empower your developers

The cross-team collaborative environment promoted by DevOps methodology requires developers to have adequate and regular system-level trusted access to the corporate core platforms. But the traditional security practices are incompetent for providing the level of access developers need. The avert this, the privileged access management practices must be scalable, lean, and rapid to deploy.

The organization must ensure that developers are empowered with privileged access to critical resources. Lean, zero-trust access management that provides automated role-based access for privileged users in development and production environments is paramount.

- Implement security across the CI/CD pipeline

The frequent release of features in DevOps helps products evolve faster. However, it’s imperative that security is enforced on each and every iteration. Initially, it is fine, to begin with just one microservice with a simple process. But, ensure that the APIs of this service are failproof. The API must be designed to perform tasks that it is intended to do, accept only the defined payloads, and respond as per your users' needs while ensuring proper authentication and authorization. This security must be enforced all along the CI/CD pipeline, from static analysis of the API contract to API implementation to runtime protection with API firewall. Then iterate on the next methods for that microservice. Thus, the DevOps toolchain is successfully integrated with security.

- Adopt DevSecOps automation and orchestration

Organizations are ought to automate the manual and time-intensive tasks of integrating security tools into the DevOps toolchains. In addition, they must centralize vulnerabilities that are highly likely to be scattered across various interfaces and platforms. However, in a bid to fuse security tools from multiple vendors into a DevSecOps workflow, it is wise to choose tools that already feature an inbuilt security orchestration engine. This helps in ensuring continuous security promise, from detection to tracking to remediation.

Enterprises are advised to leverage DevSecOps automation platforms that facilitate simple and seamless integration with existing and new security tools. This enables them to replace or remove any tool in the future without losing any historical data which is essential to understand how the security posture has evolved.

DevOps Security Tools Category Breakdown

As DevSecOps is just only beginning to gather steam, it does not yet have an established toolset. So, we have compiled some of the increasingly used DevSecOps tools that Fortune 500 companies are using to build security into their development, testing, and deployment processes.

Here are the top categories of DevSecOps tools:

Open-source Vulnerability Scanning Tools
Typically, software projects rely on oodles of external dependencies, many of which are open-source components. These components often contain security vulnerabilities. The identified open-source artifacts are categorized by their version, source, distribution, Common Platform Enumeration (CPE), and other factors. These are collated with the vulnerability databases like NVD, security advisories, and other security thresholds. This comparison helps gain insights into the vulnerability’s severity, the potential impact it poses, and remediation suggestions.

In DevSecOps methodology, a security risk assessment is performed during the planning stage to determine which components are secure and free from any vulnerabilities. Then, vulnerability scanning is performed at various stages of the development and build processes to make sure that no new vulnerabilities are introduced after the initial planning stage.

Benefits offered by vulnerability scanning at various stages in the DevSecOps are:

Scanning in development: This automatically alerts developers about the security issues in components. So, the Dev team makes swift and informed decisions on addressing these risks.
Scanning in security testing: If any component has vulnerabilities that outnumber a predefined threshold value, an alert will be raised. These alerts prompt developers to initiate remediation activities or security teams to review and prioritize the vulnerabilities.
Scanning in production and pre-production: This helps detect and address any new vulnerabilities that enter the application after a security review. They include the risks from artifacts that penetrated the project through means other than the SDLC or CI/CD pipeline, such as zero-day vulnerabilities and malware.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
Static application security testing tools enable the Dev team to scan their source code to identify lax and insecure coding lines and any other potential security issues. The detected vulnerabilities come with a severity level, thus allowing developers to prioritize remediation.

Integrating SAST into the SDLC or CI/CD pipeline will allow teams to forge quality gates that define the number of issues or the level of severity that should cause the build to fail or stop the component from being pushed to the next stages of the pipeline. Embedding with an integrated development environment (IDE) allows the development team to identify code faults as they write code, helping them build security from the start.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
Dynamic Application Security Testing tools automatically test running applications, scanning for a wide variety of threats without accessing source code. Typically, these tools perform testing on HTTP and HTML interfaces of a web app.

DAST testing is a black-box testing approach that finds application vulnerabilities from a hacker’s viewpoint by simulating common attack vectors recreating how a malicious actor may identify and exploit vulnerabilities. As DAST tools can be integrated easily with other DevOps tools, it is the best way to gauge application security in testing or staging levels.

Image Scanning Tools
Typically, DevOps teams rely on Docker images and containers to deploy containers. As these container images are commonly pulled from public repositories or any other non-trusted sources, identifying vulnerabilities is a challenge in a DevSecOps environment. Moreover, the container deployment can scale easily and can scale the attack surface as well. Likewise, Docker images and the associated base images often contain software components that may be outmoded, unpatched, and have security vulnerabilities.

Container image scanning tools scrutinize these images to ensure that they have trusted, secure code and artifacts, and are on par with secure configuration best practices. Organizations must ensure that DevSecOps processes involving containers have image scanning and remediation at every stage of the CI/CD pipeline.

Monitoring Tools
Monitoring tools enable DevOps teams to have a holistic view of their applications, deployments, infrastructure, and users. This allows them to gather the required information quickly. Moreover, the auto-scaling feature of these tools enables the organization to scale the application as per the business demands.

Infrastructure Automation Tools
Automation is the soul of DevSecOps, and the modern approaches involve automating infrastructure configuration and security. Infrastructure automation tools automatically identify and ax security vulnerabilities and configuration faults. Some of these tools include event-based automation tools, infrastructure as code (IaC)tools, and cloud configuration management tools like Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP).

Dashboard and Visualization Tools
DevSecOps teams, comprised of developers, operations, and security teams, require tools that facilitate a single dashboard for viewing and sharing security information among themselves. This can be achieved by using dashboard and visualization tools. Moreover, these tools display trends and KPIs in the most meaningful manner. Custom dashboards can collect and correlate all relevant data pertaining to security, log, and other application monitoring stats.

Threat Modeling Tools
By using threat modeling tools, the DevSecOps team can predict, identify, and assess threats across the software development lifecycle. These tools empower teams with data-driven and proactive decision-making to prevent vulnerability exposure. There are a wide variety of threat modeling tools available in the market, like visual dashboards that use data to automatically build threat models.

Alerting Tools
Alerting tools enable DevSecOps teams to swiftly respond to security incidents. The alerting tool analyzes the threat event and determines whether it is worthy of the team’s attention, before alerting the team. This significantly trims the noise in the system and prevents disruptions to the DevSecOps workflow. Once the team is alerted, they can quickly assess the incident and apply remediations.

Best DevOps Security Tools for an Enterprise CI/CD Pipeline

Alerta - This open-source tool offers a quick visualization of vulnerabilities by consolidating and deduplicating alerts from a variety of sources. It can integrate with Riemann, Nagious, Cloudwatch, and other monitoring or management services for development teams. You can customize Alerta on par with your DevOps needs using an alert API.

GitLab - GitLab is one of the most popular DevSecOps tools available in the market. It enforces DevSecOps architecture into the CI/CD pipeline. GitLab test every piece of code upon commitment and allows development teams to address security vulnerabilities while working in code. It also facilitates a dashboard for all vulnerabilities.

WhiteSource - WhiteSource seamlessly integrates into your build process, build tools, and development environments. Leveraging a constantly updated database of open-source repositories, WhiteSource continuously checks the security and licensing of open-source components. It is designed to remediate open-source vulnerabilities.

Contrast Protect - Contrast Protect is a Runtime Application Self Protection (RASP) tool. It uses the same embedded agent as Contrast Assess. The tool scopes out the production environment to identify any exploits and unknown threats in it. Then it reports the issues to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) console, firewall, or other security tools.

ElastAlert - ElastAlert is an open-source tool that offers a framework for receiving real-time alerts on security loopholes and other patterns from Elasticsearch data. It compares the Elastic search data with a predefined set of rules. When any match occurs, the tool issues alerts with recommended actions.

CodeAI - CodeAI leverages deep learning technology to automatically identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in source code. In addition to providing a list of security issues, this tool facilitates developers with a list of solutions as well.

Aqua Security - Aqua Security manages security across an entire CI/CD pipeline and runtime environment for end-to-end security. It is suitable for cloud-native applications and containers deployed across all platforms and clouds.

Parasoft Tool Suite - Parasoft provides a wide variety of automated tools for software testing and static analysis. The tool scan performs functional testing, security testing, end-to-end testing, and load and performance testing. For instance, Parasoft C/C++test is used for finding defects early in development, Parasoft Insure++ for identifying erratic programming and memory-access errors, Parasoft Jtest for Java software development testing, and Parasoft dotTEST to complement Visual Studio tools.

Contrast Assess - Contract Assess is an Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) tool that can integrate seamlessly with your apps. It monitors code and notifies you when any security issue is identified. The tool also empowers non-security developers to find and fix vulnerabilities on their own.

Red Hat Ansible Automation - This tool comprises three modules, including Ansible Engine, Ansible Tower, and Red Hat Ansible Network Automation. DevOps teams can use these modules individually or together as agentless IT automation technology. Red Hat Ansible Automation enables you to define a set of security rules to secure your software development projects.

StackStorm - StackStrom is an open-source tool that provides event-driven automation that offers scripted remediations and responses when security loopholes are identified. It also offers continuous deployment and Chat Ops optimization.

Veracode Tool Suite - Veracode provides a host of popular set automated security tools in the DevSecOps ecosystem. Some of the Veracode tools are Developer Sandbox, Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Greenlight, and Static Analysis. Developer Sandbox automatically scans code in a sandbox for vulnerabilities while Greenlight automatically scans your code as it’s written. SCA tool detects vulnerable components and Static Analysis tool finds application flaws.

Grafana - Grafana is an analytics platform. It enables the DevSecOps teams to build custom dashboards that collect and correlate all relevant data to visualize and query security data. This is also an open-source tool.

IriusRisk - IriusRisk automates risk and requirement analysis for both cloud and on-premises environments. It uses a questionnaire-based interface to design threat models and technical security requirements. IriusRisk enables DevSecOps teams to manage the code-building and security-testing phases.

Threat Modeler - Threat Modeler is an automated threat modeling tool that analyzes application data and identifies potential threats using threat intelligence. This tool is offered in both AppSec and cloud editions.

Kibana - Kibana comes in handy if you are using Elasticsearch. It aggregates oodles of log entries into a unified graphical view of operational data, and app monitoring, among others. Kibana is an open-source tool.

BDD-Security - BDD-Security is an open-source framework offered by Continuum Security. This framework allows Dev teams to test functionality as well as non-functional security environments scripted in Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) language for an agile development process. It is designed such that security features do not rely on application-specific navigation logic. So, the same security requirements can be applied more easily to various applications.

Checkmarx CxSAST - This is a SAST tool from the Check Marx Software Exposure Platform. It is capable of scanning unbuild/uncompiled source code across 25 coding and scripting languages. The tool can seamlessly integrate with all Integrated Development Environments(IDEs) and identifies hundreds of security vulnerabilities early in the SDLC. This SAST tool embeds security into all the DevOps phases as well as the Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) tool for identifying security issues in running applications.

OWASP Threat Dragon - Threat Dragon is an open-source, web-based tool. It provides a system diagramming and rules engine for automatic threat modeling and their mitigation. Featuring an easy-to-use interface, this tool seamlessly integrates with other software development lifecycle tools.

Fortify - Fortify offers end-to-end application security that covers the entire software development lifecycle. Fortify on Demand is application security as a service offering provided by Micro Focus that integrates static, dynamic, and mobile app security testing with continuous monitoring for web applications in production.

Chef InSpec - Chef InSpec is an open-source tool that automates security tests at every development stage. This helps ensure compliance and security policy requirements for the traditional servers, containers, and cloud APIs.

Synopsys Suite - Synopsys provides a host of application security testing tools, including Black Duck, Coverity, and Seeker IAST. Black Duck is an SCA tool that detects and manages the security of open-source and third-party code used in applications and containers. Meanwhile, Coverity is a SAST tool that seamlessly integrates into CI/CD pipelines and automates testing. Whereas Seeker IAST detects runtime security risks and offers a wide variety of managed services for application security testing.

Gauntlt - Gauntlt is a popular open-source testing framework that provides easy security testing and communication between development, operations, and security teams. This tool can be easily integrated into your existing tools and processes.

Dome9 Arc - This tool enables DevSecOps teams to fuse security onto the building, deployment, and running stages of public cloud applications. Dome9 Arc offers automated testing and security implementation.

Red Hat Open Shift - This DevSecOps tool offers built-in security for container-based applications. The tool’s security offerings include role-based access controls, security checks throughout the container build process, and Security-Enhanced Linux (SE Linux)-enabled isolation.

RedLock - RedLock, formerly known as Evident.io, enables developers to swiftly identify and address security threats at the development stage. It is used for detecting threats across network architecture, resource configurations, and user activities, especially on Amazon S3 and EBS volumes.

SD Elements - SD Elements is an automation platform. It collects information pertaining to your software, detects threats in it, and provides remediation measures. The tool also emphasizes relevant security controls to help you achieve security and compliance demands.

White Hat Sentinel Application Security Platform - This platform offers application security across the entire SDLC phase. It enables developers to integrate security into their tools and security teams to perform continuous testing to keep apps secure in production.

Easy Ways To Choose DevOps Security Tools

Though the process of adopting a DevSecOps approach throughout the SDLC seems simple, it can be daunting and challenging. Choosing the right set of DevSecOps tools could be a good head start. Staunchly elicit insights about your organization’s systems, networks, processes, and teams. Then, leverage the tools that will help you the most and are a perfect fit.

However, adopting DevSecOps is not just about integrating automated security tools into the CI/CD pipeline. Security expertise is imperative for using these tools effectively. Thus, it is wise to rope in DevOps expertise to achieve true DevSecOps success.

DevOps Toolchain for Beginners

Vishnu Vasudevan — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 22:41:01 +0000

In the digital world, business agility and speed are imperative for IT organizations, given the pace at which the business and technology landscape is evolving. They are obliged to respond and deliver at speeds greater than the pace of digital disruption. And, DevOps has emerged as the panacea to these challenges.

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, processes, and tools that increase an organization's ability to deliver software faster while maintaining excellence in quality. This speed enables businesses to serve their customers better and gain a competitive edge in the market. DevOps automates and integrates the efforts of development and IT operations teams to help them build, test, deploy, and monitor applications with speed, quality, and control. It is all about automating manual tasks, reducing errors, eliminating bottlenecks, and cutting down rework across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) phases.

However, a successful DevOps implementation generally relies on an integrated set of tools or a toolchain. A DevOps toolchain enables asynchronous collaboration between Dev, Ops, and security teams to seamlessly integrate DevOps workflows and automate the entire software development lifecycle. Let’s take a deep dive into DevOps toolchains:

What is DevOps Toolchain?

A DevOps toolchain is a set of tools that automates the tasks of designing, building, testing, delivering, deploying, managing, and controlling software applications throughout the system development lifecycle. It aids in achieving key DevOps principles, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration. This makes product delivery faster and more efficient.

Why Do You Need DevOps Toolchain?

The need for speed is imperative in the software world. Today, businesses are being pushed to the limit trying to adapt to an evolving market that demands rapid, real-time responses. In response, the software development that took several months is being executed in weeks by development and operations teams collaborating using DevOps methodologies.

However, as DevOps is a cultural transformation where Dev and Ops teams work in a collaborative environment, there isn’t a single tool that facilitates all the DevOps principles and practices. This escalated the need for a collection of tools (or toolchain) that operates as an integrated unit to enable the development to delivery of software. Moreover, the holy grail of DevOps – the optimal automation across software development lifecycle – remained elusive without the DevOps toolchain.

DevOps toolchain plays a crucial role in automating and orchestrating DevOps capabilities to deliver software at the desired speed and quality. Apart from these advantages, the DevOps toolchain offers many enviable business benefits.

Let’s delve into it:

Business Benefits of DevOps Toolchain

1) Fast and Efficient Deployments
Software companies constantly strive to deploy updates several times a day, which is challenging for DevOps teams. With the DevOps toolchain, DevOps teams can integrate automation into every phase of the software development lifecycle, enabling faster deployment of products with quality and efficiency. Now, instead of weekly deployments, the software companies can ensure deployments on a daily basis, and in some cases, every few hours.

2) Incident Management
Prompt incident response ensures business continuity. In today’s reality, it’s no longer a question of 'If your business will witness an incident. It’s a question of ‘When.' Thus, organizations must be prepared to respond and resolve an incident quickly and efficiently, to prevent business disruption.

A DevOps toolchain optimizes your incident response strategy. It automates much of the initial process of incident management, thereby accelerating the resolution process and shrinking the downtime. Toolchains also aid in effectively creating incident reports by absorbing and analyzing data from all impacted systems.

3) Improved Software Quality
Software bugs and issues can impede the software development process, hauling the release timeline backward. The ability to identify and remediate defects quickly and accurately is the need of the hour. Here again, the DevOps toolchain can be a game-changer. The toolchain can help DevOps teams proactively identify the issues plaguing the application, prioritize them based on their severity, and remediate the issue.

4) Workflow Automation
In Evans Data Corp's 2019 DevOps and Cloud Survey, IT managers mentioned that the most significant value proposition of workflow management tools is absorbing and analyzing end-to-end business data. Whereas developers underscored that the workflow management tools' most significant benefit is the building dashboards that visualize operational data. Whatever be the side you support, a DevOps toolchain can enchant you.

With a toolchain at your disposal, you can automate the data capture process in real-time and enable teams with seamless access to the data they need precisely when they need it.

5) Security
Security is always at the forefront of business objectives. However, many organizations fail to have a common understanding about 'who is responsible for security. Misunderstandings about the responsibility of security can trigger undesired data breaches and attacks.

A DevOps toolchain can help technology teams ensure security is addressed efficiently without potential oversights. All security aspects, including continuous monitoring, regulatory compliance, data encryption, and post-incident review reporting, can be integrated into a toolchain. This enables organizational-level security posture.

How to Build a Robust DevOps Toolchain?

A robust DevOps toolchain plays a vital role in accelerating the DevOps advantages. It’s imperative that the DevOps toolchain follows an organization-level approach, which spans across all teams, businesses, processes, systems, and applications. Moreover, it must incorporate the understanding of how each tool optimizes the advantages and fortifies the other tools in the DevOps ecosystem.

While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all' regarding DevOps tooling, a robust toolchain must incorporate underlying best practices and process efficiencies induced by version control, code quality, and continuous integration, among others. Tool selection depends on various factors like migration strategies, scalability, open-source, and licensing costs. It’s imperative to choose tools in a phased manner and start with the foundational areas like version control and configuration management to achieve initial success. Then the team can adopt tools for other DevOps practices like continuous delivery, deployment, and monitoring.

Without further, let’s dive into options for building your DevOps toolchain:

All-in-one DevOps Toolchain
An all-in-one DevOps toolchain provides standard, complete offerings that you can choose from on par with your needs. This is the best choice for the organizations just embarking on their DevOps journey or teams aiming to launch a project quickly. The pre-orchestrated set of tools fosters greater standardization and integration with nominal resources. However, as many organizations already have a set of tools in use, this toolchain may not integrate with them to deliver a complete solution. Moreover, as companies need to integrate legacy tools into the DevOps toolchain, the all-in-one toolchain can hinder it.

Customizable DevOps Toolchain
If an in-the-box solution isn’t suitable for your DevOps needs, the other approach is to choose a toolset that can be customized as per the teams' needs. You need to select all the tools you require for your toolchain and cautiously orchestrate them to integrate into your DevOps pipeline. This approach allows DevOps teams to choose and use tools as per their interests. This type of toolchain prevents you from being locked into tools or vendors. However, custom DevOps toolchains can be expensive and resource-intensive as the management and standardization of this approach is a bit challenging.

Considerations for Creating a DevOps Toolchain

Organizations must consider the below mentioned five main aspects to create a healthy DevOps toolchain:

Accept the Reality
The first and foremost step to embrace a revolutionary change is accepting the reality that change is always constant. You must be adaptable. For instance, if your code developments aren’t pushed to production quickly, you need to adopt another toolchain. In other words, you need to deploy a toolchain that pushes code quickly.

Stay Relevant
Stay relevant with the latest trends and innovations in the DevOps ecosystem. There are many companies that have already embraced DevOps and have leveraged it to the fullest. Network with them, read their success stories, interact with them in different tech communities and learn from them.

Analyze
Analyze and assess your current software development process and the tools utilized for it. Elicit vital information such as how much time each SDLC phase takes, its accuracy, and efficiency. This will help you identify the vulnerabilities, loopholes, and inept processes in your current system.

Build
Once the loopholes in the current system are identified, make the necessary changes to the system. Then start selecting the tools as per your requirements. Put your theoretical knowledge into practice to build the prototype of your toolchain. Improve your current system with these tools.

Scale
To gain an edge in the present-day everchanging IT market, businesses need to adapt and scale seamlessly as per the demands. Thus, your DevOps toolchain needs to be maintained, upgraded, and regularly configured to navigate uncertainty. You must plan your long-term toolchain support strategy.

DevOps Tools’ Categories

Project Management Tools
Project management tools aid teams in compiling a stock of user requirements that form coding projects, divide them into smaller tasks and monitor the task till completion. These tools support agile project management practices, like Scrum, Lean, and Kanban. Some of the popular open-source tools are GitHub Issues and Jira.

Source Code Repositories
These are the version-controlled coding spaces that enable multiple developers to work on the same codebase simultaneously. However, these code repository tools must be integrated with CI/CD, security, and testing tools, so that code can automatically move to the next step when it is committed to the repository. GitHub and GitLab are some of the open-source code repositories.

CI/CD pipelines
Continuous integration and deployment tools automate code building, testing, and deployment. Jenkins is the most famous CI/CD tool available in the market. Argo CD is another popular open-source tool for Kubernetes native CI/CD.

Test Automation Frameworks
Automated testing frameworks comprise software tools, libraries, and procedures for automating all testing processes, including unit testing, functional testing, contract testing, usability testing, performance testing, penetration testing, and security testing. Most of these tools support multiple languages; some even leverage artificial intelligence to automatically reconfigure testing processes in response to code changes. However, these test tools are costly. Some of the famous open-source test tools include Selenium, Katalon, Appium, Serenity, and Robot Framework.

Configuration Management Tools
Configuration management tools help manage your infrastructure as code, which then prevents configuration changes across environments. By executing a script, these tools allow DevOps teams to configure and provision fully versioned and documented infrastructure. Some open-source options include Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Terraform.

Monitoring Tools
Monitoring tools, including Data dog, Nagios, Prometheus, and Splunk, enable DevOps engineers in detecting and rectifying system issues. By collecting and analyzing data in real-time, these tools provide insights into how code changes impact application performance.

Continuous Feedback Tools
These tools collect feedback from users through various channels, including heat mapping (analyzing users' activity), self-service issue ticketing, or surveys. These feedback insights help DevOps engineers to address customer issues and improve product quality accordingly.

Artifact Repositories
Artifact repositories stores all the heavy binary artifact files that are supposed to be updated or changed. These are the repositories of libraries, DLLs, and binaries developed by using internal or external source code repositories. JFrog Artifactory and Nexus Repository are some of the popular tools in this category.

Issue Tracking Tools
An increase in transparency across the software development lifecycle gives clear vision and in-depth insights, enabling DevOps teams to track issues swiftly and efficiently. And issue tracking tools are the answer. These tools help in cataloging and tracking issues and resolve them with heightened responsiveness.

Collaboration and Communication Tools
The ‘holy grail’ of the DevOps culture is seamless collaboration and communication between different teams. Collaboration and communication tools enable a host of teams, including developers, testers, operations teams, to coordinate and work together, regardless of their location and time zone. Slack, Campfire, and Skype are some of the examples of collaboration tools.

Planning Tools
As the goal of the business is standard across the organization, stakeholders, clients, and employees working with different teams should embrace transparency. And planning tools come to the rescue by providing the required transparency. They help with sprint planning. Asana and Clarizen are some of the popular planning tools out there.

Orchestration Tools
Orchestration is all about automating workflow processes to build, test, deliver, and deploy software applications. These tools can be installed and managed by in-house development teams or outsourced as SaaS (Software as a Service) based tools. CircleCI, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins are some of the popular tools under this section.

Source Control
Every organization needs a centralized storage location for all its critical assets, including data, documentation, code, configurations, and files. Source control tools help you in this. Moreover, these tools categorize data into different branches for teams to work on. SVN, Git, and Subversion are a few examples of source control tools.

Database Tools
Organizations store, process, and handle vast amounts of valuable data daily. Every application development involves processing a lot of data. These database management tools enable organizations to handle hefty data with ease. Razor SQL and Team Desk are some of the most preferred database management tools.

Every DevOps team prefers or uses a different set of tools, and some may integrate more or fewer components into their DevOps toolchain. Stating that, the list above comprises only the most popular DevOps tools in the market.

List of Best DevOps Tools To Learn and Master

There is a wide variety of paid and open-source DevOps tools you can use to embrace DevOps maturity. Here’s the list of some popular DevOps tools:

1) Docker
Docker has garnered popularity in the DevOps ecosystem as the most commonly used DevOps tool by the DevOps teams. It is a Linux-based open-source tool that supports containerization. It means that your software is packaged and shipped along with its dependencies as a single unit. This eliminates the tedious task of managing dependencies separately. Docker is portable, secure, compatible with any language, and integrates seamlessly with other tools, such as Ansible, Jenkins, and Bamboo.

According to Forrester, Docker dominated the enterprise container platform category in quarter four of 2018.

2) Ansible
Ansible is most famous for its software automation benefit. It is used for automating software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. This open-source DevOps tool can easily handle complex deployments without any need for a dedicated systems administrator. Moreover, Ansible is agentless and uses a simple syntax written in the YAML language.

“Ansible has become the DevOps darling for software automation,” quotes CIO.

3) Git
Git has established itself as the most popular DevOps tool in the IT world. It is being used by tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. This open-source DevOps tool enables DevOps engineers to easily track their development work progress and coordinate work among themselves. With Git, one can revert to previously saved versions of their work, create branches separately, and implement new features when ready. However, organizations are required to host a repository for the work, such as GitHub.

4) Puppet
Puppet is popular for its thousands of modules. This open-source DevOps tool enables DevOps teams to manage and automate software inspection, delivery, and operation. It can seamlessly integrate with many other tools. However, the free version Puppet tool is only profitable for smaller projects. If you are working on large-scale projects, choosing Puppet Enterprise would be a wise choice. Puppet Enterprise can enable your organization to have numerous teams and thousands of resources.

5) Chef
Chef has a solid track record as the most powerful configuration management tool. This open-source DevOps tool allows you to modify infrastructure into a code and manage data, attributes, and roles, among others, with ease. Same as Puppet, Chef also supports multiple platforms and seamlessly integrates with cloud-based platforms. Irrespective of your infrastructure vastness, Chef can automate infrastructure configuration and application deployment. It can also manage configurations across the network.

6) Jenkins
Jenkins has enticed DevOps engineers with its ability to detect errors in code, quickly and efficiently. This free, open-source DevOps tool automates your delivery pipeline and allows you to test and report code changes in near real-time. Jenkins can integrate with almost every DevOps tool available in the market, as it has a vast plugin ecosystem with over a thousand plugins. This DevOps tool is compatible with Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

7) Nagios
Nagios is one of the most sought-after monitoring tools in the DevOps arena. This free, open-source DevOps tool helps identify and rectify issues in networks and infrastructure. With Nagios, DevOps teams can monitor applications, services, and network protocols, among many others. It enables you to keep a record of events like outages and failures. Presently, Nagios Core and Nagios XI are the two editions available in the market. The latest edition, Nagios XI, offers greater functionality with many new features. Anyhow, both editions have Forum support.

8) Splunk
Splunk has grabbed a position in the list of most popular DevOps tools for its ability to allow every member in the team to effortlessly access and use machine data and logs. With Splunk, DevOps engineers can quickly analyze and visualize machine data and gain insights to improve productivity and efficiency. Developers have the facility to develop custom Splunk apps and integrate Splunk data into other apps.

9) Bamboo
Bamboo is a widespread continuous integration and deployment tool. It integrates automated builds, tests, and releases into a single workflow. Though it is almost similar to Jenkins, Bamboo is not an open-source DevOps tool. This tool enables developers to automatically develop, integrate, test the source code and prepare an application for deployment. The unique features of Bamboo include easy to use graphical user interface, auto-completion, integration with various tools, and prebuilt functionalities. Developed by Atlassian in 2007, Bamboo allows DevOps teams to use CI/ CD methodologies.

10) ELK Stack
The combination of three open-source DevOps tools, including Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, is ELK Stack. While Elastic search is a search and analytics engine, Kibana is the visualization layer. Meanwhile, Logstash gathers data from various sources, which are stored by Elastic search. ELK Stack is famous as the most robust yet simple DevOps tool. It is used for centralized logging. The Stack features multiple plugins and an active support community.

11) Kubernetes
Released in 2015, this container orchestration platform helps you manage a vast number of containers with ease. Once you deploy containerized applications to a set of computers, Kubernetes automates their distribution and scheduling. However, Kubernetes is just an orchestration platform, meaning it’s not a whole solution by itself. It must be used together with other tools like Docker that lets you develop, distribute, and run containers.

12) Selenium
Selenium is known for automating tests for web applications. This open-source DevOps tool is used by many Fortune 500companies, including Google and IBM. The unique features of Selenium are that the test scripts can be written in many languages, including Python and Java. It is compatible with operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux, and works with any browser. To achieve continuous testing, Selenium should be integrated with Docker and Jenkins.

13) Vagrant
Vagrant is among the most popular open-source DevOps tools. With this tool, you can develop and manage virtual machine environments in a single workflow. Thus, all the team members, whether a developer, an operator or a designer, will have the same simple workflow. Vagrant replicates the production environment so that DevOps engineers can identify and fix bugs early in the production process. This popular tool easily integrates with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, among others.

14) Maven
Maven is an open-source DevOps tool, which is primarily used for Java projects. The primary function of this tool is automating the build process and resolution of dependencies. Maven helps in the compilation of source code, running tests, including unit tests and functional tests, integrating the results into JAR's, WAR's, and RPMs, and uploading the packages to remote repo's, Nexus, or Artifactory. The tool is developed based on the concept of a project object model. Maven depends on XML and has predefined instructions for performing regular tasks.

15) Gradle
Last but not least, Gradle is one of the most commonly used DevOps tools out there. This open-source automation tool enables writing code in several languages, including Java, C++, and Python. Though Gradle builds on Apache Ant and Maven, it uses a Groovy-based domain-specific language for describing builds. Since its release in 2009, this tool has been gaining popularity steadily for multi-project builds. Owing to its incremental builds, build cache, and daemon, Gradle is efficient than Maven.

DevOps Orchestration

DevOps orchestration is a crucial step for any organization that has embarked DevOps journey and is in the process of, or completed, implementing automation. It coordinates all the tasks automated by DevOps practices to offer improved optimization and oversight.

Initiating DevOps orchestrating can offer a host of business benefits, including:

Faster software delivery
Swift release of new features and fixtures
Minimized deployment time
Reduced service delivery cost
Increase product reliability

Moreover, DevOps orchestration enables analysts, managers, and QA to select as per their interests and quickly implement a complete environment provisioned at the proper build and configuration levels. However, orchestration in DevOps is not a walk-on-cake.

Organizations require orchestration tools that are entirely on par with their business goals to make the most of their automation efforts and DevOps implementation. Additionally, DevOps orchestration is a comprehensive organizational shift, vertically and horizontally.