The last stories of 2019

The year 2019 is almost over. Time to highlight the latest articles which has been published on the website of Amazic World. First of all, it’s good to note the articles written so far are very well received. They provide a lot of useful information for DevSecOps practitioners as well as people from the business departments of (large) organizations. Publishing every 1-2 weeks is a challenge, but inspiration is ever present to write and publish great articles. Read on to get the last stories of 2019.

Save money on your (unused) cloud resources

Almost all tech companies have at least experimented with the (public) cloud nowadays. A lot of them are experimenting and a lot of them face an unexpected (high) bill at the end of the month. What has gone wrong? Find out why and which infra resources could cost you a lot of money. Money which can be spend on other things if “orphaned” resources are kept to a minimum.

Learn how to detect orphaned resources and how to clean them all when not needed anymore. It’s about a changed mindset, resource optimization and pipelines which do the trick. Keep an eye on your monthly budgets to utilize the cloud to it’s fullest potential, otherwise it might not be worth the investment at all.

Secrets everywhere

Perhaps you don’t know which secrets you (have to) protect in your organization and where exactly these secrets live. In the article dedicated to secret management and secret management tools, you will find out which type of secrets are important to protect. Besides you will find out the differences of secrets management in an on-prem data center as well as in the public cloud. Also, we will discuss some of the tools you can use to to manage all of your secrets from a centralized point of view. With the tips provided in the article, your organizations reduces the risk of losing a secret or a secret from getting compromised.

How to choose the right tools

In large organizations tools play an important role to everyone’s day to day operations. Now and then tools need to be replaced with new ones. Not just an upgrade of an existing one, entire tools need to change to stay aligned with the needs of the organization. In this article we will discuss important factors to choose a new tool. Factors include are:

• The role of enterprise grade features
• Don’t only check the technical perspective, also explore the the business perspective
• The role of security, compliance, maintainability, scalability, etc

With these guidelines in your mind, it might be easier to select the next tool which really impacts your organization.

Terraform 0.12 and compliance as code

Halfway 2019, Hashicorp released version 0.12 of their popular Infrastructure as Code tool. It’s getting more popular every day. Version 0.12 provides a number of great new features which makes the life of developers easier. Some of them which are included in the article are:

• Context rich error messages – meaningful messages which help developers pinpoint any (scripting) issues.
• Rendering of plans and state – it is now possible to render “plan and state files” (prior to really execute the code) in JSON format. This greatly improves the readability of the code and predicts if the executing will be successful or not.
• Better code flows + improved re-usability. Write less code, but better code, reducing the maintenance of the entire code base.

Compliance as Code is a relatively new phenomenon. Writing and enforcing to (security) compliance rules by writing code. The article explains the scope and perspectives of Compliance as Code in large organizations. Besides that, it explains how Policy as Code works and the benefits of it. A great article for everyone who wants to get started with Compliance as Code.

Trends for 2020

We’d love to conclude the year by looking into the (near) future. It’s off course impossible to exactly predict the future, but some trends for the upcoming year are likely the evolve:

• Kubernetes will stay the number 1 container orchestration tool
• Security comes more and more out of the box
• The role of CNCF becomes stronger – more and more open source tools are incorporated as “CNCF projects”.
• Serverless infrastructure is likely to grow even further, but at the same time organizations struggle with the proper implementation

Last but not least: the focus on application development is back.

Conclusion

A lot has happened this year, more exiting things are around the corner. Keep on coming back and check out new posts every now and then. Hopefully all of it helped you to push your business even further into the cloud native era!

Enjoy your days off, see ya in 2020!