Firefly, an innovator that is forging new ground for managing multi-cloud infrastructure, announced it has joined the partner program for GitLab Inc., The One DevOps Platform, as a Technology partner. This strategic partnership enables DevOps teams to manage their complete cloud footprint, alongside their application code, with greater visibility and control.
Managing cloud infrastructure using IaC
With the surge of cloud-native applications, the burden of managing infrastructure has increased significantly. More companies are using multi-cloud providers and, according to a CNCF survey, 96% of those surveyed are using or consider using Kubernetes. To meet the challenge of governing complex infrastructure, organizations have been codifying their cloud assets (such as K8s clusters, AWS security groups, IAM, S3 storage, and more) into infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and Helm. IaC helps teams more efficiently manage, deploy, and govern cloud infrastructures. In a DevOps environment, it helps developers be more self-sufficient to efficiently provision the cloud resources they need, while employing guardrails for consistency, reliability, and reduced risk.
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Once codified as IaC, these cloud resources can be version controlled and governed with the same rigor as application software – all within a DevOps platform like GitLab. This approach is typically called GitOps. AppsFlyer, a global leader in marketing measurement, analytics, and engagement, uses Firefly and GitLab together to manage more than 250,000 cloud resources and dozens of SaaS integrations. Eliran Bivas, cloud native platform leader says, “Firefly provides us with greater visibility into our entire cloud footprint. With Firefly, we can see how the asset was created, who changed it, and its current state. We use GitLab to apply version control to our infrastructure code and to automate policies governing any changes.”
Bolstering GitOps with visibility into entire cloud footprint
Managing your cloud infrastructure as IaC, using a GitOps approach, can improve governance and control. The shortcoming is that it can only address cloud resources that have been codified. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and Firefly has found that on average, our customers have 76% of their cloud assets unmanaged.
This problem was very clear to AppsFlyer. Firefly enabled AppsFlyer to uncover unmanaged resources that were deployed manually or by automated systems like the Cloud Security Posture Manager. Bivan says, “Firefly quickly turned unmanaged cloud resources into codified assets, saving us over 200 hours of engineering time while improving our IaC coverage.”
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For companies that are cloud-forward, with multiple cloud service providers and often hundreds or even thousands of cloud service accounts, achieving governance for their cloud infrastructure is very difficult. Cloud and Kubernetes management tools are often siloed only addressing part of the cloud footprint. Some focus on inventory or on FinOps (the cost and utilization of cloud resources), others focus on drift or security. Most focus on custom applications developed via DevOps teams. Yet reliability is paramount when managing the cloud infrastructure. It’s important not only for DevOps teams, but also for mission critical business processes that are using Commercial Off-the-shelf SaaS applications, an area often overlooked.
Beyond GitOps: CloudOps
Firefly’s partnership with GitLab takes GitOps principles even further, applying the automated and policy-driven software management technique to the entire cloud footprint – including unmanaged assets and SaaS infrastructures, essentially enabling an automated and governed CloudOps.
Uncovering your cloud assets and codifying them is only the beginning. Configuration drift and misconfigurations happen, and ensuring that the actual state of infrastructure reflects the known and recorded infrastructure state is an ongoing effort. Trend Micro’s report reveals that infrastructure misconfigurations or failures are responsible for up to 70 percent of security events. Firefly can help here too. Firefly continuously identifies potential drift, alerting the user to choose the correct configuration: either the desired IaC state file or the actual cloud configuration. Changes are automatically captured in a GitLab merge request for visibility, traceability and policy enforcement. The GitLab CI pipeline ensures that change approval policies are followed.
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