Spring Boot is an open-source Java-based framework used to create a microservice. It is developed by Pivotal Team and is used to build stand-alone and production-ready spring applications.

Spring Boot takes an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need minimal Spring configuration.

Here are some of the benefits of using Spring Boot:

• Quick and easy to set up: Spring Boot makes it easy to create a new project and get it up and running quickly. You don’t need to spend time configuring Spring beans or other dependencies.
• Production-ready: Spring Boot applications are ready for production out of the box. They include features like embedded Tomcat or Jetty servers, automatic dependency management, and actuator endpoints for monitoring and management.
• Concise and readable code: Spring Boot applications are typically much more concise and readable than traditional Spring applications. This is because Spring Boot takes care of a lot of the boilerplate code for you.
• Community support: Spring Boot has a large and active community of users and developers. There are many resources available to help you get started with Spring Boot, including tutorials, documentation, and sample code.

What are the top use cases of Spring Boot?

Spring Boot is a popular framework for creating Java applications. It is used in a wide variety of industries and applications, but some of the top use cases include:

• Web applications: Spring Boot is a great choice for creating web applications. It provides a number of features that make it easy to build scalable and reliable web applications, such as embedded servers, automatic dependency management, and actuator endpoints for monitoring and management.
• Microservices: Spring Boot is also a popular choice for creating microservices. Microservices are small, independent services that communicate with each other over a network. Spring Boot makes it easy to create microservices that are easy to deploy, manage, and scale.
• APIs: Spring Boot is a great choice for creating APIs. APIs are used to expose functionality to other applications or systems. Spring Boot makes it easy to create APIs that are secure, scalable, and easy to use.
• Backend systems: Spring Boot is also a popular choice for creating backend systems. Backend systems are the systems that power the front end of an application. Spring Boot makes it easy to create backend systems that are reliable, scalable, and secure.
• Data science and machine learning: Spring Boot is also becoming a popular choice for data science and machine learning applications. Spring Boot makes it easy to build scalable and reliable applications that can process large amounts of data.

What are features of Spring Boot?

Spring Boot has a number of features that make it a great choice for creating Java applications. Here are some of the most important features:

• Autoconfiguration: Spring Boot automatically configures many of the Spring Framework’s features, such as dependency injection, servlets, and security. This saves you a lot of time and effort in configuring your application.
• Starter dependencies: Spring Boot provides starter dependencies for a variety of technologies, such as web development, database access, and messaging. This makes it easy to add these technologies to your application with just a few lines of code.
• Actuator endpoints: Spring Boot provides actuator endpoints that allow you to monitor and manage your application. These endpoints can be used to get information about your application’s health, metrics, and logs.
• Production-ready features: Spring Boot includes a number of features that make it production-ready, such as embedded servers, security, and logging. This means that you can deploy your application to production without having to do a lot of additional configuration.
• Concise and readable code: Spring Boot applications are typically much more concise and readable than traditional Spring applications. This is because Spring Boot takes care of a lot of the boilerplate code for you.
• Large and active community: Spring Boot has a large and active community of users and developers. There are many resources available to help you get started with Spring Boot, including tutorials, documentation, and sample code.

What is the workflow of Spring Boot?

The workflow of developing applications using Spring Boot follows a series of steps that encompass project setup, development, testing, and deployment.

The workflow of Spring Boot is as follows:

• Create a new Spring Boot project. You can do this using the Spring Boot Initializr website or the Spring Boot CLI.
• Add the dependencies you need. Spring Boot provides starter dependencies for a variety of technologies, such as web development, database access, and messaging. You can add these dependencies to your project using the Spring Boot Initializr or the Spring Boot CLI.
• Write your code. Your code will typically consist of controllers, services, and repositories. Controllers handle HTTP requests, services perform business logic, and repositories interact with the database.
• Configure your application. Spring Boot uses annotations to configure your application. You can use annotations to configure things like the port your application listens on, the database you use, and the security settings.
• Run your application. You can run your application using the Spring Boot Maven plugin or the Spring Boot Gradle plugin.
• Test your application. You can test your application using JUnit or the Spring Boot Test framework.

How Spring Boot Works & Architecture?

Spring Boot is a framework that helps you create Java applications quickly and easily. It is based on the Spring Framework, but it takes a more opinionated approach to configuration. This means that Spring Boot makes a lot of decisions for you, such as which dependencies to use and how to configure them. This can be a benefit, as it can save you time and effort. However, it can also be a drawback, as you may not have as much control over your application.

Spring Boot works by using a number of features, including:

• Autoconfiguration: Spring Boot automatically configures many of the Spring Framework’s features, such as dependency injection, servlets, and security. This saves you a lot of time and effort in configuring your application.
• Starter dependencies: Spring Boot provides starter dependencies for a variety of technologies, such as web development, database access, and messaging. This makes it easy to add these technologies to your application with just a few lines of code.
• Actuator endpoints: Spring Boot provides actuator endpoints that allow you to monitor and manage your application. These endpoints can be used to get information about your application’s health, metrics, and logs.
• Production-ready features: Spring Boot includes a number of features that make it production-ready, such as embedded servers, security, and logging. This means that you can deploy your application to production without having to do a lot of additional configuration.

How to Install and Configure Spring Boot?

Installing and configuring Spring Boot is a straightforward process. Spring Boot provides a variety of options for setting up and developing applications.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started:

1. Prerequisites:

• Java Development Kit (JDK): Spring Boot requires JDK 8, 11, or 16 (depending on *the version you choose). You can download JDK from the official Oracle website or use OpenJDK.
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE): While not strictly required, using an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse can greatly enhance your development experience.

2. Install Spring Boot:

Spring Boot can be set up in multiple ways, but one of the most common methods is to use the Spring Initializr web interface or IDE integration:

Using Spring Initializr (Web Interface):

1. Open your web browser and navigate to https://start.spring.io/.
2. Choose the project settings, such as language (Java), Spring Boot version, packaging (JAR or WAR), and Java version.
3. Select the dependencies you need for your project, such as “Spring Web” for web applications, “Spring Data JPA” for database access, and others.
4. Click the “Generate” button to download a zip file containing your Spring Boot project.

Using IDE Integration:

Most modern IDEs provide integration with Spring Initializr, allowing you to create a Spring Boot project directly from within the IDE:

1. Open your IDE (e.g., IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse).
2. Look for an option to create a new project. In IntelliJ IDEA, you can go to “File” > “New” > “Project” and select “Spring Initializr.”
3. Choose project settings and dependencies similar to the steps mentioned above in the web interface approach.
4. Follow the prompts to create the project.

3. Develop and Configure:

Once you’ve set up your Spring Boot project, you can start developing your application:

1. Project Structure: Your Spring Boot project will have a standard directory structure, including source code (src/main/java), resources (src/main/resources), and tests (src/test).
2. Application Class: Every Spring Boot application has a main class annotated with @SpringBootApplication. This class serves as the entry point for your application.
3. Configuration: You can configure your application using properties files (application.properties or application.yml) located in the resources folder. These files can be used to customize various aspects of your application.
4. Dependencies: Spring Boot’s dependencies are managed using build tools like Maven or Gradle. Your project’s dependencies are specified in the build configuration file (pom.xml for Maven or build.gradle for Gradle).

4. Run and Test:

You can run your Spring Boot application in various ways:

1. IDE: If you’re using an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, you can run the application by right-clicking the main class and selecting “Run” or “Debug.”
2. Command Line: Navigate to your project’s root directory and use the following command to run the application:

./mvnw spring-boot:run # For Unix-like systems
mvnw.cmd spring-boot:run # For Windows

3. Packaging: To create an executable JAR file, you can use the following command:

./mvnw clean package

5. Access the Application:

By default, your Spring Boot application will run on port 8080. Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080 to access your application. If you’ve defined custom configurations, endpoints, or mappings, you can access those as well.

Fundamentals Tutorial of Spring Boot

Absolutely, here’s a step-by-step fundamentals tutorial of Spring Boot to help you get started:

1. Install Prerequisites:

• Java Development Kit (JDK) 8, 11, or 16.
• Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse (optional but recommended).

2. Create a Spring Boot Project:

You can use the Spring Initializr (https://start.spring.io/) to generate a Spring Boot project. Choose project settings, dependencies, and packaging. Download and extract the generated project.

3. Open Project in IDE:

Open the project in your chosen IDE. If you’re using IntelliJ IDEA, choose “Open” and select the project folder.

4. Explore Project Structure:

Take a look at the project structure. Key directories include:

• src/main/java: Java source code.
• src/main/resources: Configuration files and resources.
• src/test: Test-related code.

5. Create a Simple REST Controller:

Create a new class in the src/main/java directory. For example,

‘HelloController.java’:

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
public class HelloController {

    @GetMapping("/hello")
    public String hello() {
        return "Hello, Spring Boot!";
    }
}

6. Run the Application:

Run the application using your IDE or the command line:

./mvnw spring-boot:run # Unix-like systems
mvnw.cmd spring-boot:run # Windows

7. Access the Endpoint:

Open a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/hello. You should see “Hello, Spring Boot!”.

8. Customize Configuration:

Create or modify the application.properties or application.yml file in the src/main/resources directory to customize configuration settings. For example, you can change the server port:

server.port=8081

9. Spring Boot Starters:

Explore Spring Boot starters to simplify dependency management. For example, you can use spring-boot-starter-web for web applications. Add these dependencies to your pom.xml or build.gradle.

10. Data Access (Optional):

Integrate databases using Spring Data JPA. Create entity classes, repositories, and services for database interactions.

11. Spring Boot Testing:

Write unit tests and integration tests for your application components. Use testing frameworks like JUnit and Mockito.

12. Spring Boot Actuator (Optional):

Integrate Spring Boot Actuator to expose endpoints for monitoring and managing your application.

13. Build and Package:

Build your application into a JAR or WAR file:

./mvnw clean package # Unix-like systems
mvnw.cmd clean package # Windows

14. Run the Packaged Application:

Run the JAR file you’ve built:

java -jar target/your-app-name.jar

15. Further Learning:

Explore more advanced features like Spring Security, data validation, handling exceptions, connecting to databases, creating RESTful APIs, using Thymeleaf for templates, and more.

Spring is a popular open-source framework for building and developing enterprise-level Java applications. It provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for developing modern, scalable, and maintainable applications. Spring is designed to address various aspects of application development, including dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming, transaction management, security, and more.

Spring provides a number of features that make it a powerful and versatile framework, including:

• Inversion of control (IoC): Spring uses IoC to decouple components in an application. This makes it easier to test and maintain applications.
• Dependency injection (DI): Spring uses DI to inject dependencies into components. This makes it easier to change dependencies without having to modify the components that use them.
• Aspect-oriented programming (AOP): Spring supports AOP, which allows you to modularize cross-cutting concerns in your application.
• Template engines: Spring supports a number of template engines, such as Thymeleaf and FreeMarker. This makes it easy to generate HTML, XML, and other types of output.
• Data access: Spring provides a number of data access technologies, such as JDBC, JPA, and Hibernate. This makes it easy to access data from a variety of sources.
• Web development: Spring provides a number of features for web development, such as MVC, WebSockets, and REST. This makes it easy to develop web applications.

What are the top use cases of Spring?

Spring is a powerful and versatile framework that can be used to develop a wide variety of applications.

Here are some of the top use cases of Spring:

• Web development: Spring is a popular choice for web development. It provides a number of features that make it easy to develop web applications, such as MVC, WebSockets, and REST.
• Microservices: Spring is a good choice for microservices architectures. It provides a number of features that make it easy to develop and manage microservices, such as service discovery and load balancing.
• Data access: Spring provides a number of data access technologies, such as JDBC, JPA, and Hibernate. This makes it easy to access data from a variety of sources.
• Enterprise applications: Spring is a good choice for enterprise applications. It provides a number of features that make it easy to develop and maintain enterprise applications, such as security and transactions.
• IoT: Spring is a good choice for IoT development. It provides a number of features that make it easy to develop and manage IoT applications, such as device management and data streaming.
• Cloud computing: Spring is a good choice for cloud computing. It provides a number of features that make it easy to develop and deploy applications on cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

What are the features of Spring?

Spring is a powerful and versatile framework that provides a number of features that make it a good choice for Java development.

Here are some of the features of Spring:

• Inversion of control (IoC): Spring uses IoC to decouple components in an application. This makes it easier to test and maintain applications.
• Dependency injection (DI): Spring uses DI to inject dependencies into components. This makes it easier to change dependencies without having to modify the components that use them.
• Aspect-oriented programming (AOP): Spring supports AOP, which allows you to modularize cross-cutting concerns in your application.
• Template engines: Spring supports a number of template engines, such as Thymeleaf and FreeMarker. This makes it easy to generate HTML, XML, and other types of output.
• Data access: Spring provides a number of data access technologies, such as JDBC, JPA, and Hibernate. This makes it easy to access data from a variety of sources.
• Web development: Spring provides a number of features for web development, such as MVC, WebSockets, and REST. This makes it easy to develop web applications.
• Security: Spring provides a number of features for security, such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. This makes it easy to secure your applications.
• Testing: Spring provides a number of features for testing, such as unit testing, integration testing, and continuous integration. This makes it easy to test your applications.
• Performance: Spring is designed to be performant, making it a good choice for applications that require high performance.
• Scalability: Spring is designed to be scalable, making it a good choice for large applications.
• Reliability: Spring is designed to be reliable, making it a good choice for applications that need to be highly available.
• Documentation: Spring has extensive documentation, making it easy to learn and use.
• Community: Spring has a large and active community, making it easy to get help when you need it.

What is the workflow of Spring?

The workflow of Spring can be divided into the following steps:

• Define the components of your application: The first step is to define the components of your application. This includes defining the classes that will make up your application, as well as the dependencies between them.
• Configure the application: Once you have defined the components of your application, you need to configure it. This includes configuring the dependencies between the components, as well as configuring the application’s environment.
• Bootstrap the application: The next step is to bootstrap the application. This involves initializing the Spring IoC container and loading the application’s configuration.
• Create the beans: The Spring IoC container will then create the beans that make up your application. These beans are the objects that will perform the work of your application.
• Invoke the beans: Once the beans have been created, they will be invoked. This is when the application will start to do its work.
• Shut down the application: When the application is finished, it will be shut down. This involves destroying the beans and releasing any resources that they are using.

How Spring Works & Architecture?

Spring is a popular Java framework that provides a comprehensive infrastructure for developing Java applications. It is used by a wide variety of applications, from small web applications to large enterprise applications. Spring works by using the Inversion of Control (IoC) principle. IoC means that the Spring framework controls the creation and instantiation of objects in your application. This decouples your code from the details of how objects are created and instantiated, making your code more modular and easier to test.

Spring also provides a number of other features that make it a powerful and versatile framework, including:

• Dependency injection: Spring uses dependency injection to inject dependencies into objects. This means that you don’t have to worry about creating and managing dependencies yourself. Spring will do it for you.
• Aspect-oriented programming (AOP): Spring supports AOP, which allows you to modularize cross-cutting concerns in your application. This makes your code more readable and maintainable.
• Template engines: Spring supports a number of template engines, such as Thymeleaf and FreeMarker. This makes it easy to generate HTML, XML, and other types of output.
• Data access: Spring provides a number of data access technologies, such as JDBC, JPA, and Hibernate. This makes it easy to access data from a variety of sources.
• Web development: Spring provides a number of features for web development, such as MVC, WebSockets, and REST. This makes it easy to develop web applications.

How to Install and Configure Spring?

Here are the steps on how to install and configure Spring:

1. Install Java Development Kit (JDK). Spring requires a JDK to run. You can download the latest version of the JDK from the Oracle website.

2. Install Spring Boot CLI. Spring Boot CLI is a command-line tool that can be used to create and manage Spring Boot applications. You can download the latest version of Spring Boot CLI from the Spring Boot website.

3. Create a new Spring Boot project. You can use the Spring Boot CLI to create a new Spring Boot project. To do this, run the following command:

spring init --build=maven --dependencies=web my-project

This will create a new project called my-project with the following dependencies:

• Spring Web
• Spring Boot DevTools

4. Add your code. Once you have created a new project, you can add your code to the src/main/java directory. The main class for your application should be called DemoApplication.java.

5. Run your application. To run your application, you can use the following command:

mvn spring-boot:run

Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google. Angular is a full-stack framework that can be used to build single-page applications (SPAs). It is a popular choice for building web applications because it is easy to learn and use, and it is very powerful. Angular is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. This means that it separates the data (model), the user interface (view), and the logic (controller). This makes it easy to develop and maintain large and complex web applications.

Angular includes a number of features that make it a powerful and versatile web framework, such as:

• Dependency injection: Angular uses dependency injection to inject dependencies into components. This makes it easy to test components and make changes to the dependencies without affecting the components.
• Two-way data binding: Angular uses two-way data binding to synchronize the data in the model with the data in the view. This makes it easy to update the view when the data in the model changes and to update the model when the data in the view changes.
• Routing: Angular includes a built-in routing system that makes it easy to navigate between different views in your application.
• Forms: Angular includes a built-in forms system that makes it easy to create and validate forms in your application.
• Internationalization: Angular supports internationalization, so your application can be translated into multiple languages.
• Testing: Angular includes a built-in testing framework that makes it easy to test your application.

What is top use cases of Angular?

Here are some of the top use cases of Angular:

• Single-page applications (SPAs): Angular is a good choice for building SPAs because it is a full-stack framework that can be used to handle both the front-end and back-end of an application.
• E-commerce: Angular is a good choice for building e-commerce applications because it is a scalable framework that can handle a large number of users and transactions.
• CMS: Angular is a good choice for building content management systems (CMSs) because it is a powerful and versatile framework that can be used to create complex and customizable CMSs.
• CRM: Angular is a good choice for building customer relationship management (CRM) systems because it is a scalable framework that can handle a large number of users and interactions.
• Intranets: Angular is a good choice for building intranets because it is a secure and reliable framework that can be used to protect sensitive data.

What is the feature of Angular?

Angular is a powerful and versatile web framework that includes a number of features that make it a good choice for a wide range of projects. Here are some of the key features of Angular:

• Dependency injection: Angular uses dependency injection to inject dependencies into components. This makes it easy to test components and make changes to the dependencies without affecting the components.
• Two-way data binding: Angular uses two-way data binding to synchronize the data in the model with the data in the view. This makes it easy to update the view when the data in the model changes and to update the model when the data in the view changes.
• Routing: Angular includes a built-in routing system that makes it easy to navigate between different views in your application.
• Forms: Angular includes a built-in forms system that makes it easy to create and validate forms in your application.
• Internationalization: Angular supports internationalization, so your application can be translated into multiple languages.
• Testing: Angular includes a built-in testing framework that makes it easy to test your application.

What is the workflow of Angular?

The workflow of Angular is the process of developing an Angular application. It can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Planning: The first step is to plan your application. This includes defining the scope of the application, identifying the features that you want to include, and creating a timeline for development.
2. Design: Once you have a plan, you can start designing your application. This includes creating wireframes and mockups of the user interface and defining the data structures and algorithms that you will use.
3. Setup: Angular applications are typically set up using the Angular CLI. This tool can be used to create a new Angular project, install dependencies, and run the application.
4. Development: Once you have your project set up, you can start developing your application. This includes creating components, services, and modules.
5. Testing: It is important to test your application regularly. This will help you to identify and fix bugs before you release your application to the public.
6. Deployment: Once your application is tested and ready to go, you can deploy it to a production server. Angular applications can be deployed to a variety of servers, such as Apache, Nginx, and Heroku.
7. Maintenance: Once your application is deployed, you need to maintain it. This includes fixing bugs, adding new features, and updating the application for new versions of Angular.

How Angular Works & Architecture?

Angular follows a component-based architecture and is designed to create dynamic, single-page web applications (SPAs). Its architecture involves several key concepts that work together to provide a structured and organized way of building applications.

Here’s an overview of how Angular works and its architecture:

• Dependency injection: Angular uses dependency injection to inject dependencies into components. This makes it easy to test components and make changes to the dependencies without affecting the components.
• Data binding: Angular uses data binding to synchronize the data in the model with the data in the view. This makes it easy to update the view when the data in the model changes and to update the model when the data in the view changes.
• Routing: Angular includes a built-in routing system that makes it easy to navigate between different views in your application.
• Forms: Angular includes a built-in forms system that makes it easy to create and validate forms in your application.
• Internationalization: Angular supports internationalization, so your application can be translated into multiple languages.
• Testing: Angular includes a built-in testing framework that makes it easy to test your application.

How to Install and Configure Angular?

Installing and configuring Angular involves setting up the necessary tools and dependencies to start developing Angular applications. Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Install Node.js and npm:

Angular requires Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) to manage dependencies. If you don’t have them installed, you can download and install them from the official Node.js website: https://nodejs.org/

2. Install Angular CLI:

The Angular Command Line Interface (CLI) is a powerful tool that simplifies Angular development tasks. You can install it globally using npm:

Open your terminal or command prompt and run:

npm install -g @angular/cli

3. Create a New Angular Project:

Once the Angular CLI is installed, you can create a new Angular project by using the ng new command:

ng new project-name

Replace project-name with the desired name for your project. The CLI will prompt you to choose various configuration options.

4. Navigate to the Project Directory:

Navigate into the project directory that was created by the Angular CLI:

cd project-name

5. Serve the Application:

To start a development server and see your application in a browser, run:

ng serve

The development server will provide you with a URL (usually http://localhost:4200/) where you can access your application.

6. Explore the Project Structure:

Angular projects generated by the CLI have a predefined directory structure. Familiarize yourself with the directories like src, app, assets, and environments. The src/app directory contains your application’s components, services, and other files.

7. Create Components:

Use the Angular CLI to generate components. For example, to create a new component named “my-component,” run:

ng generate component my-component

This will create the component files and update the necessary configuration automatically.

8. Configure Routing (Optional):

If your application requires multiple views and navigation, you can configure routing using the Angular Router. You can set up routes in the app-routing.module.ts file.

First permission:

As you know the first thing our browser needs to run a Laravel project is, the index file which is located in the public folder
so we need to make it read and writable so that our browser can access it and if required can modify it.

Run the below command to grant access to the public folder

cd /opt/lampp/htdocs/YOUR_PROJECT
sudo chmod -R +rw public

Second permission:

The next permission if for the storage folder, as you already know when our Laravel projects runs it create some logs files automatically if any error found in you code base,

Run the below command to grant access to the logs folder

cd /opt/lampp/htdocs/YOUR_PROJECT
sudo chmod -R +rw storage

Third permission:

At the end, the final permission we have to give to our session folder which is located inside our storage/framework folder,
and every time we hit our project URL a new random session key is generated, that get stored in our session folder
so all of them are necessary to run a Laravel project

Run the below command to grand access to the framework and session

sudo chmod -R 775 framework
sudo chmod -R 775 session

That’s it, these all works for me hope it for you too

That this year has been an interesting one for us in IT is an understatement. It’s been a very good year for public cloud though, with record growth in AWS and Azure. And for many businesses, the “digital transformation” journey towards the cloud has been highly accelerated. Maybe last year’s small proof-of-concept Azure deployments have grown into full-scale production resources. Or the inability to access your co-lo datacenter servers due to COVID-19 restrictions has forced a migration of VMs to public cloud.

Whatever the reason, you may find yourself responsible for a lot more cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) resources and now taking stock of the security posture of all of it.

This article will look at the comprehensive guidance Microsoft offers for “how to do security” in Azure and how to use the tool that brings it all together: Azure Security Center (ASC).

Cloud Adoption Framework

The CAF is a good place to start, at any stage in your cloud journey, particularly for larger businesses. Based on cloud adoption best practices from Microsoft, partners and customers, it has guidance and tools to shape technology, people and processes for cloud success. It covers strategy and planning, migration, governing, management, organization and innovation. Here we’re going to focus on the security strategy, part which covers conceptS such as securing your cloud resources as well as using cloud technology to transform how you do security, along with the shared responsibility model.

Moving to the cloud means that some parts of security (physical hosts/network/datacenters) are now the responsibility of the provider, whereas other parts stay with you (data, endpoint devices, accounts and identities). Further, with IaaS you still have to secure the OS and applications in your VMs, apply network controls and manage your identity directory (Azure Active Directory — AAD). Using PaaS services shifts some of these responsibilities to the cloud provider, depending on the service you’re using. This is one reason that you should look to modernize your applications away from IaaS towards PaaS as there’s less for you to secure, but new features to understand to ensure a good security resilience.

The CAF also covers different admin security roles involved in managing cyberrisk and how they change when you’re in the cloud. More direct guidance is also on offer through a set of recommendations and a reference implementation.
The Well-Architected Framework, on the other hand, is a set of assessments building on these five pillars:

Cost Optimization
Operational Excellence
Performance Efficiency
Reliability
Security
The assessments ascertain where you’re at today, and then spits out a set of curated guidance to improve your approach.

Cisco Brings Ansible Automation to SAN Infrastructure

Cisco Systems announced expanded support for the open-source Ansible automation framework on its storage area network (SAN) platform, specifically targeting the Cisco MDS 9700 series. The move is part of a broader initiative to bring DevOps-style automation practices to enterprise IT infrastructure—an area that has historically lagged behind the automation maturity of application development pipelines.

With the updated MDS 9700 platform modules, IT operations teams can automate common SAN configuration tasks including:

• VSAN (Virtual SAN) configuration
• Device-alias configuration
• Zoning configuration

These are tasks that have traditionally required manual CLI work or vendor-specific tooling, making them slow, error-prone, and difficult to integrate into modern CI/CD workflows.

Why Ansible? A Declarative Approach for Operations Teams

According to Adarsh Viswanathan, Cisco’s product manager for data center storage at the time, the choice of Ansible was deliberate. Cisco had previously invested in open APIs, OpenStack integration, and Python-based scripting—all of which required meaningful programming knowledge from IT operations staff.

Ansible raises the abstraction level. Its declarative, YAML-based playbook model means that operations engineers can define what a storage configuration should look like without needing to write imperative code to achieve it. This lowers the barrier to automation adoption significantly, especially in enterprise IT teams that are not primarily composed of software developers.

Key characteristics of Ansible that make it well-suited for infrastructure automation in this context include:

• Agentless architecture: No software needs to be installed on managed devices, which matters for network and storage appliances.
• Idempotent playbooks: Running the same playbook multiple times produces the same result, reducing the risk of configuration drift.
• Large ecosystem: Ansible Galaxy and vendor-maintained collections (including Cisco’s own) provide ready-made modules for network and storage tasks.
• Low programming prerequisite: YAML-based playbooks are readable and writable by operations engineers without deep development skills.

Additional Platform Updates: NVMe, All-Flash, and SAN Analytics

Alongside the Ansible announcement, Cisco outlined several hardware and software updates for the MDS 9700 platform:

• 64G line card support: Higher-bandwidth line cards were planned to be supported when they became available.
• NVMe and All-Flash array support: Recognizing the shift toward low-latency NVMe-based storage, Cisco added protocol-level support for these environments.
• SAN Analytics extension: Cisco extended its SAN Analytics software to support the NVMe/Fibre Channel protocol, complementing existing SCSI/Fibre Channel support. This enables telemetry and performance monitoring across both legacy and modern storage protocols from a single platform.

The DevOps Pressure on IT Operations

The underlying driver for this type of announcement is a well-documented tension in enterprise IT: development teams accustomed to the on-demand, self-service model of public cloud providers increasingly expect the same experience from on-premises infrastructure. When they don’t get it, they route around IT operations—spinning up cloud resources directly and creating shadow IT sprawl.

At the time of this announcement, a significant majority of enterprise workloads still ran in on-premises data centers despite more than a decade of cloud adoption. IT operations teams managing those environments needed tools that let them respond to developer requests at cloud-like speed—provisioning and reconfiguring storage dynamically rather than through slow manual change-control processes.

Frameworks like Ansible directly address this gap by enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) practices for storage and networking, not just compute and application layers.

Cloud-Native Workloads and the SAN Challenge

Cloud-native applications built on microservices architectures add a further dimension to the problem. As the number of discrete application services sharing a common pool of SAN-attached infrastructure grows, the frequency and granularity of required storage configuration changes increases correspondingly. Manual processes simply cannot keep pace.

Ansible-based automation for platforms like the Cisco MDS 9700 means that zoning changes, VSAN provisioning, and device alias updates can be triggered programmatically—integrated into deployment pipelines or executed via self-service portals—rather than queued as manual tickets to a storage administrator.

Practical Takeaways for DevOps and Storage Engineers

If you manage Cisco MDS SAN environments and are evaluating automation strategies, the following points are worth considering:

1. Explore Cisco’s Ansible collections: Cisco publishes and maintains Ansible collections for its networking and storage platforms on Ansible Galaxy. These provide purpose-built modules for MDS management tasks.
2. Start with idempotent playbooks for existing configurations: Before automating changes, use Ansible to codify your current desired-state configurations. This creates an auditable baseline and enables drift detection.
3. Integrate with your CI/CD pipeline: Storage configuration changes triggered by application deployments can be orchestrated through the same pipeline tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) used for application code.
4. Evaluate SAN Analytics alongside automation: Automated provisioning without observability creates blind spots. Cisco’s SAN Analytics capabilities, especially with NVMe/FC support, complement automation by surfacing performance anomalies that may result from configuration changes.
5. Plan for NVMe adoption: If your organization is moving toward All-Flash or NVMe-based storage, verify that your SAN platform’s Ansible modules support NVMe/FC operations, not just legacy SCSI/FC.

Summary

Cisco’s expansion of Ansible support on the MDS 9700 SAN platform is a concrete step toward making enterprise storage infrastructure manageable through the same automation frameworks used across the rest of the DevOps toolchain. By adopting Ansible’s declarative model, IT operations teams gain a practical path to automating SAN configuration at scale—without requiring deep programming expertise—while simultaneously supporting the modern storage protocols (NVMe/FC) that high-performance, cloud-native workloads demand.

Cloud Computing as a Strategic Technology

Cloud computing has evolved from a niche IT concept into the backbone of modern enterprise infrastructure. As an umbrella term, it describes on-demand access to shared computing resources — servers, storage, databases, networking, software — delivered over the internet. Rather than owning physical hardware, organisations rent capacity from large-scale providers and pay only for what they use.

For developing economies, the promise is significant. Cloud services offer a cost-effective path to deploying and managing large volumes of IT resources without the capital expenditure required to build on-premises data centres. They also enable participation in newer paradigms such as blockchain, where participants need to record information in decentralised ledgers and access it remotely from multiple locations.

The State of Cloud Adoption in Bangladesh

Major cloud service providers — including AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle — are active in Bangladesh through local partner companies. Demand is growing, particularly in the private sector, driven by rapid digital adoption across a large and increasingly connected population.

Microsoft has been publicly vocal about its ambitions in the market. At a Microsoft Cloud Innovation Summit titled “Transforming Bangladesh with Cloud” held in Dhaka, Sook Hoon Cheah, President of Microsoft Southeast Asia New Markets, highlighted the private sector as a primary growth area. Sonia Bashir Kabir, former Managing Director of Microsoft Bangladesh, pointed to the country’s scale — over 160 million people generating large volumes of data — as a major driver of business potential.

However, a key constraint shapes market strategy: the Government of Bangladesh restricts the hosting of government data outside the country. This limits cloud providers largely to private-sector engagements for now.

Key Barriers to Cloud Adoption

Several structural and regulatory challenges slow broader cloud adoption in Bangladesh and in similar developing markets:

• Low awareness: Many organisations, particularly small and medium enterprises, lack a clear understanding of what cloud computing is, how it works, and what risks and benefits it carries.
• Absence of a dedicated legal framework: No legislation directly governs or regulates cloud computing services. The Government of Bangladesh Information Security Manual (GoBISM) 2016, produced by the Bangladesh Computer Council under the ICT Ministry, provides guidelines and recommendations for government agencies, but its use is voluntary and not mandated across sectors.
• Cross-border data restrictions: Cloud infrastructure is inherently global. Data typically traverses and resides in servers outside the originating country. Bangladesh’s Bank Companies Act, 1991 (Section 12) restricts banks from removing records and documents related to their business to locations outside Bangladesh without prior approval from Bangladesh Bank. Whether this restriction applies to cloud-hosted data is legally ambiguous. Non-banking private organisations are not subject to the same explicit restriction, but the regulatory uncertainty itself creates hesitation.
• No comprehensive data privacy law: Without strong data privacy legislation, personal data hosted on cloud infrastructure may be vulnerable to unauthorised disclosure by cloud providers. This is both a legal gap and a reputational risk for organisations handling sensitive customer data.
• Cybersecurity exposure: Large-scale national and international cyberattacks remain a persistent threat. Without a national cybersecurity strategy tied to cloud adoption, organisations face significant residual risk.

Global Data Protection Standards as a Reference Point

Established economies have moved decisively to create regulatory frameworks that enable cloud adoption while protecting individual rights. Two prominent examples are worth examining:

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR, which came into effect in May 2018, sets a comprehensive standard for how personal data must be collected, stored, processed, and transferred. It applies not only to EU-based organisations but to any entity processing data about EU residents. Key principles — purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limits, security obligations, and rights of access and erasure — are directly relevant to how cloud providers must handle data on behalf of enterprise customers.

APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPRs)

Developed by the 21 member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the CBPR system provides a mechanism enabling organisations to demonstrate compliance with a common privacy standard when transferring data across borders within the region. It is designed to balance privacy protection with the practical need for data to flow freely to support digital trade and services.

The BSA Cloud Computing Scorecard

The Software Alliance (BSA) publishes a Global Cloud Computing Scorecard that ranks countries on their policy readiness for cloud adoption. The 2018 edition assessed policy areas including privacy law, security frameworks, cybercrime legislation, intellectual property protection, standards and interoperability, free trade in cloud services, and IT infrastructure.

The Scorecard found that most high-scoring countries had comprehensive data protection frameworks in place and had established independent privacy regulators. Several countries — including Brazil, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam — were identified as having no comprehensive data privacy law or only very limited protections in place at the time of publication. Canada and Mexico ranked highest in the privacy dimension.

The clear implication: privacy law is not just a compliance requirement. It is an enabler of cloud adoption. Without it, organisations are reluctant to migrate workloads, and providers are reluctant to commit investment.

What a Sound Legal Framework for Cloud Adoption Should Include

For any government seeking to unlock the benefits of cloud computing — cost efficiency, scalability, innovation — while managing its risks, a comprehensive policy and legal framework is a prerequisite. That framework should address the following areas:

• Data privacy legislation: Define how personal data may be collected, processed, stored, and transferred, including rights for individuals to access, correct, and delete their data.
• Cross-border data transfer rules: Establish clear conditions under which data may be hosted or processed outside the country, replacing ambiguous restrictions with workable compliance mechanisms.
• Data encryption and security standards: Mandate minimum technical controls, including encryption at rest and in transit, access management, and regular security audits.
• Data backup, recovery, and archiving: Require cloud providers and enterprise users to maintain verifiable backup and recovery capabilities for critical data.
• Data portability: Ensure organisations can retrieve and migrate their data if they switch providers, avoiding lock-in and supporting competitive markets.
• Cybercrime legislation: Enact and enforce laws that criminalise unauthorised access, data theft, and sabotage of cloud infrastructure.
• National cybersecurity strategy: Define responsibilities across government agencies, cloud providers, and enterprise users for detecting and responding to incidents.
• Risk assessment requirements: Mandate that organisations conduct formal risk assessments before migrating to cloud services, and that providers verify controls are properly implemented before onboarding customers.
• Harmonisation with international standards: Align domestic rules with frameworks like GDPR and APEC CBPRs to reduce barriers to cross-border services and attract investment.

Avoiding Overregulation

A critical balance must be struck. Overly restrictive policies — those that effectively prohibit cross-border data flows or impose disproportionate localisation requirements — create trade barriers and stifle the cloud market rather than protecting citizens. Regulation should be designed to build trust and manage genuine risk, not to prevent adoption.

Cloud services’ value depends fundamentally on users trusting that their data will be handled as agreed. Providers must ensure that all controls are properly implemented before onboarding enterprise customers, and that data is not used or disclosed beyond the agreed purposes. Governments must create a legal environment where that trust is enforceable.

Summary

Cloud computing offers developing economies a genuine opportunity to modernise their IT infrastructure, reduce costs, and participate in global digital services. But the technology cannot deliver on that promise without a clear legal and regulatory foundation. Data privacy law, cross-border transfer rules, cybersecurity standards, and a risk-based compliance approach are not optional extras — they are the preconditions for sustainable, trustworthy cloud adoption. Policymakers who invest in getting this framework right will unlock far greater returns from cloud investment than those who leave the legal landscape ambiguous.

Overview: DevOps for Federal Government

Delivering software quickly inside the U.S. federal government is notoriously difficult. Agencies must satisfy a dense web of compliance obligations — FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST SP 800-53, and agency-specific systems development lifecycle (SDLC) requirements — before any workload can reach production. eGlobalTech, a federal IT services firm, built its DevOps Factory framework specifically to reconcile agile delivery speed with those compliance demands.

After roughly a year of pilot testing at agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), eGlobalTech made DevOps Factory broadly available to the public sector.

What Is DevOps Factory?

DevOps Factory is an end-to-end framework and toolchain designed to move federal agencies from idea to production release as quickly and securely as possible. According to Rajiv Kadayam, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at eGlobalTech:

“The ultimate core objective of DevOps Factory is the rapid transformation of nascent business ideas and requirements into functioning production release offerings.”

The framework was explicitly designed to align with federal policies and standards, including:

• SDLC deliverables — structured lifecycle documentation and governance checkpoints
• FedRAMP — the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program for cloud security authorizations
• FISMA — the Federal Information Security Management Act
• NIST SP 800-53 — the security and privacy control catalog for federal information systems

The goal is to give agencies security and flexibility while enabling them to “continuously iterate and scale with changing business needs,” Kadayam said.

Two Core Components: Espial and Cloudamatic

Espial: Shift-Left Penetration Testing

One of the most distinctive elements of DevOps Factory is Espial, a tool that automates and integrates penetration testing directly into the CI/CD pipeline. Traditional federal IT projects often defer penetration testing to an independent third party immediately before deployment — a practice that surfaces vulnerabilities far too late to fix cheaply.

Espial shifts that testing left, triggering early detection and remediation during development rather than at deployment gates. As Kadayam explained:

“Rather than having penetration testing done right before deployment by an independent third party — we still have that — we wanted to have early visibility to those issues that are typical in a web application project. We want to be able to detect those issues early in the process, and this tool helps us to do just that.”

Importantly, Espial does not replace the independent third-party assessment required for FedRAMP authorization — it supplements it by catching common web application vulnerabilities continuously throughout the development cycle.

Cloudamatic: Cloud Deployment Automation

Espial works alongside Cloudamatic, which eGlobalTech launched in 2016. Cloudamatic is compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and accelerates the automatic deployment of secure applications onto cloud platforms by handling:

• Provisioning and configuring cloud infrastructure
• Orchestrating complex, multi-component software configurations
• Managing virtual private cloud (VPC) topologies and security group/firewall settings
• Interconnecting systems across agency boundaries

Much of this orchestration happens behind the scenes, allowing developers to focus on writing and pushing code while the platform handles the complex infrastructure engineering underneath.

Real-World Results: HHS and FEMA

HHS: Cloud Release Times Cut from Hours to Minutes

At the Department of Health and Human Services, DevOps Factory reduced the time required to release workloads to the cloud from four to five hours down to approximately 30 minutes, according to Kadayam. This order-of-magnitude improvement in deployment speed is a direct result of automating provisioning and compliance checks that previously required manual intervention.

FEMA: Scalable Geospatial Disaster Management

At FEMA, the use case is more operationally critical. DevOps Factory supports a cloud-based geospatial disaster management environment used by all FEMA regions, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate responses to natural disasters. The platform enables users to publish and consume geo-coded data in near real time.

Elastic scalability is essential here. As Kadayam noted: “When an emergency happens, usage really spikes.” The platform must absorb sudden, unpredictable surges in demand — a scenario where manual infrastructure management would be untenable.

eGlobalTech also implemented a fully electronic change management process for FEMA developers using Jira (Atlassian’s issue-tracking tool), giving developers visibility into appeals and recordkeeping without the overhead of document-heavy, meeting-intensive approval workflows.

Security by Design: FedRAMP and FISMA Compliance

Because eGlobalTech supported FedRAMP from the framework’s inception, it was able to bake security and compliance directly into the DevOps Factory architecture rather than bolting them on afterward. This “security by design” approach includes:

• Automated enforcement of NIST SP 800-53 security controls
• Continuous compliance monitoring integrated into the CI/CD pipeline via Espial
• Electronic audit trails and governance records to satisfy FISMA documentation requirements
• Support for multi-VPC architectures with segmented security and firewall configurations

As Kadayam described it, the goal is to make traditionally paper-heavy compliance processes electronic: “Our approach is to be able to make a lot of those more and more electronic.”

Who Is DevOps Factory For?

DevOps Factory targets agile developers within federal agencies who need to push code changes to development and testing environments independently, without waiting on manual infrastructure or compliance processes. The framework gives those developers a self-service experience while the platform automates the complex, regulated engineering happening underneath — orchestrating deployments, managing cloud networking, and maintaining compliance posture continuously.

The framework’s flexibility is a deliberate design choice. As Kadayam put it: “The idea of DevOps Factory is to provide flexibility to agencies” in meeting their specific systems engineering and development lifecycle guidelines.

Key Takeaways

• Compliance and speed are not mutually exclusive — with the right automation, federal agencies can achieve both.
• Shift-left security testing (Espial) surfaces vulnerabilities during development, reducing costly late-stage remediation without replacing required independent assessments.
• Cloud deployment automation (Cloudamatic) handles complex multi-cloud provisioning, freeing developers from infrastructure toil.
• Electronic change management using tools like Jira can replace document-heavy governance workflows without sacrificing auditability.
• Elastic scalability is operationally critical for government systems that must respond to unpredictable demand spikes, such as disaster response platforms.

Original reporting by GCN.com. All quoted statements are attributed to Rajiv Kadayam, Senior Director of Technology Strategy at eGlobalTech, as reported by GCN.

A new framework built atop Kubernetes is the latest project to offer serverless or AWS Lambda-style application architecture on your own hardware or in a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering.

The Fission framework keeps the details about Docker and Kubernetes away from developers, allowing them to concentrate on the software rather than the infrastructure. It’s another example of Kubernetes becoming a foundational technology.

Some assembly, but little container knowledge, required

Written in Go and created by managed-infrastructure provider Platform9, Fission works in conjunction with any Kubernetes cluster. Developers write functions that use Fission’s API, much the same as they would for AWS Lambda. Each function runs in what’s called an environment, essentially a package for the language runtime. Triggers are used to map functions to events; HTTP routes are one common trigger.

Fission lets users effortlessly leverage Kubernetes and Docker to run applications on it. Developers don’t need to know intimate details about Docker or Kubernetes simply to ensure the application can run well. Likewise, developers don’t have to build app containers, but they can always use a prebuilt container if needed, especially if the app is larger and more complex than a single function can encapsulate.

Fission’s design allows applications to be highly responsive to triggers. When launched, Fission creates a pool of “prewarmed” containers ready to receive functions. According to Fission’s developers, this means an average of 100 milliseconds for the “cold start” of an application, although that figure will likely be dependent on the deployment and the hardware.

We’re just getting warmed up!

A few good clues indicate what Fission’s developers want to do with the project in the future. For one, the plan includes being as language- and runtime-agnostic as possible. Right now the only environments (read: runtimes) that ship with Fission are for Node.js and Python, but new ones can be added as needed, and existing ones can be modified freely. “An environment is essentially just a container with a web server and dynamic loader,” explains Fission’s documentation.

Another currently underdeveloped area that will be expanded in future releases: The variety of triggers available to Fission. Right now, HTTP routes are the only trigger type that can be used, but plans are on the table to add other triggers, such as Kubernetes events.

We call it DevOps but much of the time there’s a lot more discussion about the needs and concerns of developers than there is about other groups.

There’s a focus on improved and less isolated developer workflows. There are many discussions around collaboration, continuous integration and delivery, issue tracking, source code control, code review, IDEs, and xPaaS – and all the tools that enable those things. Changes in developer practices may come up – such as developers taking ownership of code and pulling pager duty.

We also talk about culture a great deal in the context of developers and DevOps. About touchy-feely topics like empathy, trust, learning, cooperation, and responsibility. It can all be a bit kumbaya.

What about the Ops in DevOps? Or, really, about the other constituencies who should be part of the DevOps process, workflow, and even culture? Indeed, DevSecOps is gaining some traction as a term. DevOps purists may chafe at “DevSecOps” given that security and other important practices are supposed to already be an integral part of routine DevOps workflows. But the reality is that security often gets more lip service than thoughtful and systematic integration.

But what’s really going on here is that we need to get away from thinking about Ops-as-usual (or Security-as-usual) in the DevOps context at all. This is really what Adrian Cockcroft was getting at with the NoOps term; he didn’t coin it but his post about NoOps while he was at Netflix kicked off something of an online kerfuffle. Netflix is something of a special case because they are so all-in on Amazon Web Services, but Adrian was getting at something that’s more broadly applicable. Namely that, in evolved or mature DevOps, a lot of what Ops does is put core services in place and get out of the way.

Ironically, this runs somewhat counter to the initial image of breaking down the wall between Dev and Ops. Yes, DevOps does involve greater transparency, collaboration, and so forth to break down siloed behaviors but there’s perhaps an even stronger element of putting infrastructure, processes, and tools in place so that Devs doesn’t need to interact with Ops as much while being (even more) effective. One of the analogies I like to use is that I don’t want to streamline my interactions with a bank teller. For routine and even not so routine transactions, I just want to use an ATM or even my smartphone.

It’s up to Ops to build and operate the infrastructure supporting those streamlined transactions. Provide core services through a modern container platform. Enable effective automated developer workflows. Mitigate risk and automate security. But largely stay behind the scenes. Of course, you still want to have good communication flows between developers and operations teams; you just want to make those communications unnecessary much of the time.

(At the same time, it’s important for Dev and Ops teams to understand how they can mutually benefit by using appropriate container management and other toolchains. There’s still too much of a tendency by both groups to think of something as an “ops tool” or a “dev tool.” But that’s a topic for another day.)

Modern container platform

A DevOps approach can be applied just about anywhere. But optimizing the process and optimizing cloud-native applications is best done on a modern platform. Take it as read that most IT is going to be brownfield and DevOps may even be a good bridge between existing systems, applications, and development processes and new ones. But here I’m focusing on what’s optimized for new apps and new approaches.

You need scale-out architectures to meet highly elastic service requirements. Application designs with significant scale-up components simply aren’t able to accommodate shifting capacity needs.

Everything is software-defined because software functions, such as network function virtualization and software-defined storage, are much more flexible than when the same functions are embedded in hardware.

The focus is on applications composed of loosely-coupled services because large monolithic applications can be fragile and can’t be updated quickly.

A modern container platform enables lightweight iterative software development and deployment in part because modern applications are often short-lived and require frequent refreshes and replacements.

As I wrote about in The State of Platform-as-a-Service 2016, a PaaS like Red Hat’s OpenShift has evolved to be this modern container platform, embracing and integrating docker-format containers, kubernetes for orchestration and using Red Hat CloudForms (based on the ManageIQ upstream project) for open source hybrid cloud management.

Automated developer workflows

When thinking about the toolchain associated with DevOps, a good place to start is the automation of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CICD) pipeline. The end goal is to make automation pervasive and consistent using a common language across both classic and cloud-native IT. For example, Ansible allows configurations to be expressed as “playbooks” in a data format that can be read by both humans and machines. This makes them easy to audit with other programs, and easy for nondevelopers to read and understand.

A typical automated workflow begins with operations provisioning a containerized development environment, whether a PaaS or more customized environment. This provides an example of how a mature DevOps process separates operations and developer concerns; by providing developers with a dynamic self-service environment, operations can focus on deploying and running stable, scalable infrastructure while developers focus on writing code.

Automation then ensures that the application can be repeatedly deployed. Many different types of tools are integrated into the DevOps workflow at this point. For example:

• Code repositories, like Git
• Container development tools to convert code in a repository into a portable containerized image that includes any required dependencies
• Vagrant for creating and configuring lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments¥IDEs like Eclipse
• CICD software like Jenkins

Mature DevOps systems may even push the code directly to production once it has passed automated testing. But this isn’t about removing Ops from its role of ensuring stable and robust production systems. Rather, it’s about automating the processes to ensure that deployed code meets set criteria without ops needing to be directly involved with each deployment.

Mitigate risk and automate security

Ops is also ultimately chartered with protecting the business. This doesn’t mean eliminating all risk – which can’t be done. But it does mean mitigating risk which is accomplished in part by managing the software supply chain and by automating away sources of manual error.

That’s not to say that security is purely an ops concern – hence the aforementioned DevSecOps term. Creating a mindset in which everyone is responsible for security is key as is the practice of building security into development processes. Security must change from a defensive to an offensive posture that is both automated and constant.

Among the practices to be followed in such a proactive environment are:

• Components built from source code using a secure, stable, reproducible build environment
• Careful selection, configuration, and security tracking of packages
• Automated analysis and enforcement of security practices
• Active participation in upstream and community involvement
• Thoroughly validated vulnerability management process

I think this quote from Gartner captures the required dynamic well: “Our goal as information security architects must be to automatically incorporate security controls without manual configuration throughout this cycle in a way that is as transparent as possible to DevOps teams and doesn’t impede DevOps agility, but fulfills our legal and regulatory compliance requirements as well as manages risk.”