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In a rapidly evolving DevOps landscape, IT governance is crucial for aligning security, operations, and productivity, ensuring that organizations meet their business objectives. As companies move to the cloud, they often find themselves at different stages of governance implementation, each presenting unique challenges. This article outlines a four-step approach to automating governance using AWS services, offering valuable insights for those navigating this transition.

Understanding Governance in a DevOps Context

In a DevOps-centric environment, developers are tasked with building and managing services. They frequently rely on a central security team to establish and enforce policies, conduct security reviews, and implement best practices. However, these policies are often viewed as flexible guidelines rather than strict mandates, allowing developers to leverage AWS effectively. Unfortunately, time constraints and a lack of awareness may lead to deviations from these best practices, creating potential risks. If policies were enforced too rigidly, the security team could inadvertently become a bottleneck.

For organizations transitioning to AWS, the automated governance strategies discussed here aim to maintain developer flexibility while ensuring necessary controls for the security team.

Common Challenges in Dynamic Development Environments

Some prevalent challenges in a dynamic development setting include:

• Rapid completion of tasks, leading to practices like hardcoding credentials.
• Managing costs, such as controlling the types of instances launched.
• Ensuring effective knowledge transfer among team members.
• Reliance on manual processes that can introduce errors.

Steps to Effective Governance

The four-step approach to automating governance involves:

1. Establishing Controls: Implement controls for high-risk actions during the initial setup.
2. Monitoring the Environment: Continuously monitor your resources to ensure proper configuration.
3. Addressing Issues Promptly: Identify and rectify any discrepancies as soon as they arise.
4. Conducting Regular Audits: Produce audit reports that confirm compliance with governance standards.

To illustrate this approach, consider a scenario where a central IT team permits its Big Data division to operate a test environment using Amazon EMR clusters. Initially, the team runs jobs with 100 t2.medium instances. However, when a team member inadvertently launches 100 r3.8xlarge instances for quicker processing, the company faces unexpected costs.

To prevent similar incidents, the central IT team implements the following governance measures:

• Control Elements: Utilizing CloudFormation to limit the number and type of instances, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to restrict modifications to the EMR cluster to authorized personnel.
• Monitoring Elements: Employing tagging, AWS Config, and AWS Trusted Advisor to keep track of instance limits and detect any violations.
• Fixing Issues: Creating a custom Config rule to terminate instances that do not match the specified type.
• Auditing: Reviewing the lifecycle of EMR instances through AWS Config.

Control Mechanisms

Standardizing configurations using AWS CloudFormation, restricting options via AWS Service Catalog, and managing permissions with IAM are essential for minimizing errors. AWS CloudFormation consolidates the workflow environment into a single package, allowing teams to set restrictions on instance types and numbers effectively.

For instance, the team can prevent the selection of r3.8xlarge instances by utilizing CloudFormation templates with fixed parameters.

Monitoring Practices

Leverage logs from AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon VPC, Amazon S3, and Elastic Load Balancing for comprehensive monitoring. AWS Config, Trusted Advisor, and CloudWatch events can aid in this process. CloudTrail logs API calls, helping identify who launched unexpected instances, while AWS Config tracks compliance with established rules.

By following these steps, organizations can establish a robust governance framework that balances security and operational flexibility, ensuring developers can innovate without compromising safety.

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