Introduction to Governance as a Code
Governance as a Code is defining how applications and infrastructure should run. Governance as a Code acts as an overall managing hand that helps users stick firmly to the organization’s best practices.
What is Governance as a Code?
To manage all the infrastructure in the cloud, constant optimization is necessary for maintaining the performance, availability, security, optimum cost, and usage of applications and infrastructure.
For Example, suppose you are maintaining the security of a web application or a cluster. In that case, the security team needs to regularly analyze the security, identify the loopholes, and fix them as a continual process. Due to the manual process, the loopholes went unnoticed for long intervals and made it difficult for them to manage their security.
As the cloud environment is changing rapidly, it is impossible to manually maintain the security/health of the applications and infrastructure. A solution is required for maintaining the governance, the same way DevOps found a solution through “Infrastructure as a Code.” The solution that maintains the governance in automated ways without spoiling the agility is known as “Governance as Code.”
What is the Importance of Governance in IaC?
Infrastructure as a Code becomes a standard for managing the infrastructure and is an essential DevOps practice for continuous delivery. Still, with this compliance, management and standards are not maintained as per the requirements.
Governance as a Code removes that manual work or analysis from cloud management using the machine learning principle, automation, policy management, and governance. This will enable the organizations to deliver efficient and consistent outputs with maximum security without sacrificing agility.
What is the need of Governance as Code?
Consider having a code in your firm that can grasp the business service you are providing —including the underlying applications and resources that interacted to create this service—and is capable of balancing performance, dependability, and the financial necessity to satisfy your business needs. If a user deviates from best practices, systems based on governance as code would provide a recommendation and push the necessary modifications to keep the desired state. Some of these modifications will require interaction with people but many will be done automatically.
Governance as code promises enormous improvements in terms of efficiency and innovation. It uses machine learning, automation, governance, and policy management principles to take the guesswork out of cloud administration. In many ways, governance as code will be similar to high-frequency trading, which depends on the sophisticated business and strategy-aware software and algorithms to accomplish results that humans cannot. IT teams can use governance as code to establish and automate best practice standards for managing all elements of services, applications, and infrastructure, including cost, availability, security, performance, and consumption.
How to achieve Governance as a Code?
- Decide What to do: Prepare a strategy and identify your workloads and stakeholders.
- Analyze and Document: Rationalize the security requirements, i.e., defining standards, best practices, security architecture, and internal constraints.
- Automate Deploy and Monitor: Build or deploy the security architecture and automate the rules defined in the policy engine. Automation is essential to govern at cloud speed, and also it makes it easier to maintain governance.
- Track: Integrating the policies with the internal management systems and provide reports and recommendations to the different departments and teams
Conclusion
Governance as a Code means maintaining governance in automated ways without spoiling the agility. It is leveling up your approach by getting visibility from your past success and failures. It is a new approach for managing the cloud and enables the teams to run at cloud speed by maintaining the optimum performance, efficiency, security, and best practices.
What's Next?
- Read the importance of Continuous Testing
- Why your organisation must implement Compliance as Code?
