Repost - Cloud DevOps and Security

There is a buzz in Australia, post Amazon’s Web Services Summit, around a few cloud related concepts. I will try and distill.

Public cloud: Enterprises here are mostly talking about hosting Internet/extranet-facing corporate applications on Amazon EC2 AMI instances (think little Windows or Linux virtual servers) behind Amazon’s elastic load balancers (IaaS) or Microsoft’s Azure Platform, which abstracts above active directory, Web servers and database servers.

Private cloud: Some enterprises are getting interested in spinning up VPNs into Amazon to host intranet applications on shared hardware.

Roll your own private cloud: Some enterprises have engaged service providers to create their own private cloud environments on dedicated hardware on their own premises.

DevOps: This is the concept of not only version-controlling and release-managing a software package installation but also the installation/configuration of the infrastructure that the software package sits on by the use of automation. The catch phrase for DevOps is "Infrastructure as Code".

In practice this usually means scripts of some sort that deploy Amazon AMIs, elastic load balancers, configure them, and build/deploy the software package. There are many benefits, namely consistent infrastructure configuration across environments, better (often also automated) testing and the ability to frequently and rapidly deploy. Some single-application, massive-scale, online companies deploy new software versions multiple times a day.

How does security fit into this?

In software deployment there are a few key security controls. Segregation of development, test and production environments—approvals for release from development to test and from test into production should be segregated so that one person cannot write and promote code to production.

Infrastructure security controls also need to be deployed for DevOps style automated deployment. The configuration scripts should securely configure the systems to benchmarks. Did you know that the Center for Internet Security are planning to have CIS benchmark configured AMIs in the Amazon Marketplace?

All this DevOps and Cloud stuff is starting to help us Infosec people with the basics so we can focus on the tricky appsec aspects. I encourage you all to investigate Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and start to enter a new and potentially more secure world!