GitOps is increasingly popular among developers as it accelerates development, but as security requirements grow, a new approach is needed. GitOps security needs to shift left. Here’s how to secure your GitOps repository.
GitOps is gaining traction among developers as it accelerates development work significantly in the CI/CD process. GitOps provides developers with a single, unified source of truth, which eliminates many of the teams’ workflow administrative hurdles. It also simplifies sharing code and working collaboratively on shared repositories.
There are multiple reasons to adopt GitOps. Here are a few: A GitOps repository contains up-to-date declarative descriptions of the infrastructure applicable to the production environment. Dedicated GitOps tools then automate the process of updating the production environment to match the repository updates.
In practice, this translates into eliminating the need to deploy new applications or updates. You can simply achieve this by updating the GitOps repository.
As far as Infrastructure-as-Code is concerned, GitOps is a valuable resource. It is often used in conjunction with tools that automate synchronization between the GitOps repository and the infrastructure, such as ArgoCD. These tools provide accountability by saving changes as files. The synchronization process can be fully automated to reflect any change in the repository, scheduled at regular intervals or manually activated as required.
How does GitOps helps to tighten cloud native security?
For all its advantages, GitOps is not quite yet free of issues. For starters, not all developers are security conscious. As GitOps gives them the opportunity to push their code as soon as they deem it ready, it generates a perilous garbage in – garbage out situation. This is compounded by the copious amount of documentation produced that reduces visibility. Unchecked, this freedom to push at will may introduce serious vulnerabilities.
Avoiding this scenario requires DevOps to update their mindset and focus on integrating security at every stage of the development lifecycle.
Security is everyone’s responsibility and must permeate all levels of each development team. Panoptica, which provides Kubernetes, Container, and API security, integrates with GitOps. Panoptica vastly improves cloud native security on GitOps. Here’s how:
Cloud native security with GitOps can be achieved with Panoptica when using a certified deployer, such as ArgoCD, to automate GitOps.
Panoptica:
Developers can then integrate these YAML file security rules directly into their policies, facilitating keeping up with best practices for secure development. These policies are updated every time a change is made.
These rules and their modification can be viewed both in the connection area and in the CICD.
When GitOps is fully integrated with a cloud native security solution like Panoptica, without sacrificing speed, it considerably enhances the entire development process while minimizing risks, a double advantage worth considering.
To test out Panoptica with GitOps, access a free trial here.