Standards

This concept isn't just a theoretical proposition; it has tangible, real-world applications potent enough to revolutionize organizational operations. Consider Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), a cornerstone of DevOps philosophy. Here, the infrastructure required to run applications is defined and managed through code.

This approach ingeniously transforms the 'how' of setting up and managing infrastructure into the 'what'. As you write the code to set up a server, you're simultaneously defining what that setup should include - the operating system, installed applications, network configurations, among others.

Similarly, in the realm of cloud automation, services like AWS CloudFormation or Terraform empower you to manage your cloud resources using code. The act of writing this code necessitates defining your cloud strategy - what resources you need, how they should be configured, and how they interact. Once again, the 'how' of writing the code becomes an integral part of the 'what' your cloud strategy should be.

The fusion of strategy with implementation in DevOps and cloud automation yields numerous benefits.

1. Agility: By intertwining strategy with implementation, alterations can be made swiftly and seamlessly. You're not merely updating a plan; you're directly tweaking the system itself.
2. Consistency: Because the plan is embedded in the code, it's meticulously followed every time that code is executed. This eradicates manual errors and ensures consistent application of your strategy.
3. Transparency: With the strategy encoded directly into the system, it's visible to all what the plan is and how it's being implemented.
4. Version Control: Like any other code, your strategic 'blueprint' can be version controlled. This facilitates easy tracking of changes and rollbacks if necessary.

The code not only implements your plan but also helps define it, as you'll need to determine 'how' to best enforce the principles set by your plan.

In this new reality of converged strategy and implementation, there's an increased emphasis on security controls, data privacy, and regulatory compliance.

Securing the 'What' and 'How'

To ensure secure and compliant operations, companies must consider security factors at both the 'what' and 'how' levels. The 'what', or the strategy, consists of the policies that define acceptable behavior and operations. This includes identity and access policies, data classification, and security and compliance requirements, among others.

The 'how', on the other hand, is about implementation. This is where execution tools like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or security hardening come into play. Here, the emphasis is on ensuring that these security principles are enforced accurately and consistently.

Keeping Automation Secure

The potential benefits offered by IaC and cloud automation come with a caveat - that is, the need for secure automation. Automating security measures is notoriously difficult, as minor errors can lead to serious security vulnerabilities. In this context, it's essential to have a clear strategy for security automation and implement it accurately. This should include detailed security checks to ensure that configuration, access, and application policies are correctly enforced.

The act of writing code should constitute part of the planning itself; Security should be thought of as 'Controls as Code'.

To ensure secure automation, Security should be thought of as 'Controls as Code'. This entails mapping out all controls of an organization and converting its strategy into explicitly codified security rules. This necessitates implementing the right controls - ones that can be automated, monitored, and scaled - to meet compliance requirements.

Codifying the security strategy brings about a wide array of advantages over traditional manual methods. A few of these include auditability, integrity enforcement, scalability, and time-frame reduction. By leveraging automation capabilities efficiently, organizations can capture these benefits and realize the maximum potential of efficiency, scalability, auditing, security and flexibility.

• Write scripts to control access using AWS IAM
• Design Terraform code that automatically provisions cloud resources in compliance with security guidelines
• Utilize infrastructure orchestration tools such as Ansible and Chef to automate security hardening procedures.
• Firewall and network rules can be dynamically provisioned and managed through code.
• State Management should also be utilized to ensure consistent security across all resources in an environment.

Identity and Access Policies

Integrate identity and access management (IAM) into your strategy; use role-based access control (RBAC) to create user roles with specific permissions, and version control to implement changes through pull requests

Organizations have specific requirements for identity and access policies, outlining the security controls related to authentication, authorization, data access, and network restriction. To ensure that these policies are enforced accurately and consistently, organizations must integrate identity and access management (IAM) into their strategy. This can be achieved by centrally managing credentials through automated systems like AWS IAM or Azure Active Directory (AD).

In addition, organizations should implement role-based access control (RBAC), creating user roles with specific permissions for different resources. These roles can be monitored and regularly audited to ensure compliance with your policy requirements.

State Management

Ensure consistent security across all resources in an environment with state management techniques, such as configuration automation; record changes made to your system to ensure environment parity and cloud integrity

To ensure that security controls remain consistent and compliant, it's essential to employ rigorous state management techniques. State management essentially refers to tracking and recording the state of the system over time. This facilitates efficient and continuous compliance since you can easily reference earlier states of your system and ensure that all changes are compliant.

This is where configuration automation comes into play. By automatically recording changes (or 'states') made to your system, you can quickly restore an earlier version (or 'state') if needed. Moreover, this helps you centralize compliance activities, as any violations recorded in earlier states can be referred to for historical context or resolution.

In the context of security, compliance, and data privacy, the confluence of strategy and implementation is even more important. Such topics are characterized by considerations of critical elements such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability, and require strict adherence.

Mapping of Development Scenarios to Logical and Physical Actions

The 'What' and 'How' of Security and Compliance

To achieve secure and compliant operations, organizations must commit to the 'what' - strategizing and planning for security and compliance - and the 'how' - implementing these strategies and controlling access everywhere.

Let's use the example of the three core elements of security and compliance outlined above - confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The 'what' in this context can be viewed as the strategic decision to prioritize these elements and include them in your plan. For instance, you may decide that certain user roles should have access to specific data (Confidentiality), that data should be available to users when needed (Availability), and that data processing should be accurate, complete, and authorized (Processing Integrity).

The 'how', then, becomes the implementation of these controls using code. For example, you may write scripts that automatically enforce these controls by managing user access, creating redundant data storage to ensure availability, or validating data processing operations.

The convergence of the 'what' and 'how' in this way not only enhances efficiency but also builds trust. By encoding your strategy directly into your system, you make it clear to users, stakeholders, and auditors that you take these elements seriously and have concrete mechanisms in place to enforce them.

Moreover, because these controls are applied consistently every time the code is run, you reduce the risk of errors or oversights that could lead to security breaches or compliance violations.

Leveraging Convergence for Continuous Compliance

This convergence also facilitates continuous compliance - an increasingly important concept in today's fast-paced digital landscape. By intertwining strategy with implementation, you can ensure that your system remains compliant even as it evolves and adapts to new requirements or circumstances.

For instance, as new privacy regulations are introduced, you can update your user-access rules (the logical 'what') and quickly implement those changes through code (the physical 'how'). This allows you to maintain compliance while minimizing disruption to your operations.

This demonstrates the power of converging strategy and implementation - it fosters agility, consistency, and trust, enabling you to keep pace with the rapidly changing digital environment.

To bring strategy and implementation together, organizations need a unified language. YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is uniquely suited to this task.

YAML simplifies the translation of strategic decisions into executable tasks. Its structured data format can be easily read by humans and executed by machines, making it a powerful tool for representing the logical 'what' of an organization's operations.

By using YAML for both the 'what' and 'how', organizations can set up powerful automated systems that bring their strategy to life, ensuring consistency and accuracy while facilitating governance. Ultimately, this translates to organizations being able to put their strategies into action and reap the benefits.

As a data language, YAML can be used in both the logical and physical perspectives.

Development operations are decentralized making it difficult to standardize. Having an organizational standard eliminates the confusion that could arise when different teams have adopted different patterns, approaches or platforms.

Organizational standards should be voluntary, easy to understand by all teams, and focused to make change manageable.

Organizational standards should provide framework for applications, CI/CD pipelines, end-user experience and etc., by reducing inconsistency and improving team productivity. This also helps enforce development best practices across teams so there are no surprises when things come together in production environment.

Pull Requests are the New ServiceDesk Tickets

With YAML, any changes to the configuration should require a review by the team and approvals before merging. This is similar to submitting a service desk request to modify access rights.

This allows teams to control changes and reduce the number of outages due to changes in the environment or other issues. It also records any changes made for auditing responsibilities and security tracking later on. This is especially important for heavily regulated industries (e.g. finance, healthcare, etc.) or companies that need to demonstrate compliance with specific regulations such as PCI DSS, SOC 2 and CMMC.

Toil and bugs can be reduced as well. This is because the pull requests are a new ticketing system for the team and it allows for easier tracking of any issues that occur as now all changes are logged and tracked.

Pulled Back Through, and Into Production

YAML allows you to pull changes back through development and testing environments, and into production where you would deploy the new version live. This ensures that changes are tested in production before they go live, allowing for any potential issues to be addressed before ruining the user experience.

It also enables teams to maintain different configurations without needing to constantly update code in each environment. Teams can deploy new code by merging it into each environment's branch separately, allowing them to test each stage of the process without needing to replicate manual effort. This not only improves security but increases development speed as well.

In the logical perspective (the 'what'), you can use YAML to define the various elements of your strategy. For instance, you might outline the structure of your cloud resources, the rules for user access, or the stages of your deployment pipeline.

YAML allows you to represent this information in a structured, yet easy-to-read format. This makes it easier for stakeholders to understand your strategy and for your team to translate that strategy into action.

Simple example of how you might define a cloud resource in YAML [resources.yml]

Implementation with YAML

On the implementation side (the 'how'), YAML can also be used in conjunction with various tools to automate the application of your strategy. Tools like Terraform, AWS Cloudformation, and Ansible support YAML as a language for defining and managing infrastructure

When executed, this will create the four applications outlined in the YAML file. This demonstrates how, by leveraging YAML in both the logical and physical perspectives, your strategy can be automatically implemented with code. [apps.yml]

YAML standards are the key to unifying strategy and implementation. They provide a unified language to represent 'what' you want your system to be, and 'how' you want it to behave.

From a strategic standpoint, YAML standards can be used to represent organizational policies and objectives. For example, an organization might define a YAML standard for its Dev teams. This would involve outlining the team members with their respective skills and access control parameters (the 'what').

Example of a Dev Team rules defined in YAML

Through the use of YAML standards, the convergence of strategy and implementation is realized, allowing for efficient translation of business requirements into executable tasks. This not only streamlines operations but also enhances transparency and understanding across different stakeholders.

Standard YAML Manifest of team members on an imaginary Apollo Team, with definitions of access, tools and environments. [team.yml]

Policy Standards in YAML Example

YAML standards are especially powerful when applied to policy definition and implementation. Consider the example of a policy standard for the logging of data in an organization. Example of a Data Logging policy defined in YAML:

This YAML document describes a policy that requires logging of specific fields when behaving in specific locations.

This policy can then be used in the 'how' - for example, to create automated scripts that will enforce this policy. This implementation can be further parameterized and extended, ensuring consistency and compliance with the rule defined in the 'what'.

The Power of Convergence in Infrastructure Maintenance

The convergence of the 'what' and 'how' also offers considerable advantages to infrastructure maintenance. Consider, for instance, the task of regular backup tasks.

Example of YAML standard for defining backup policies, part of Pipeline-as-Code approach.

In this process, the 'what' exists as best practices for backup frequency and data retention. Here you specify how often backups should run (e.g., daily, weekly) and for how long data should be retained (e.g., 1 month, 2 months).

In the 'how', you would use this information as parameters for your code. This enables you to automatically create scheduled jobs that will execute backups according to your defined requirements. As an example, here's a YAML document specifying a data backup policy:

Finally, the 'what' and 'how' converge in powerful tools like GitHub Actions and YAML Standards. By combining these two elements, organizations can define and execute their projects in a single, integrated environment.

GitHub Actions are workflows that enable developers to automate tasks associated with a repository. This includes tasks like testing, building, scanning and delivering code. By utilizing GitHub Actions, organizations can automate all of the 'how' associated with their projects.

Meanwhile, YAML standards provide the 'what': the plan or strategy for how their code should be deployed and managed. They specify the configuration and settings that should be applied to each task in their workflow.

The combination of GitHub Actions and YAML Standards makes it easy to manage all of the code and configuration associated with a project in one centralized place. This allows organizations to set up a powerful 'what' and 'how'; the YAML Standards define the 'what' of what the code should do, while the GitHub Actions determine the 'how' consisting of the steps which are needed to run the code and deploy the project.

This simplified approach to managing the 'what' and 'how' of a project not only improves the speed with which projects are produced but also increases the security and reliability of those projects. By keeping all code and configuration in one repository, organizations can ensure that security and compliance requirements are applied consistently across all aspects of the project.