Securing Application and Infrastructure Pipeline Deployments

by Roheem Olayemi

Introduction

In a world with a constant need for creative solutions for various human needs such as financial planning, lifestyle, sports, business, and others, the development of innovative applications is meant to solve this. Businesses want to go to market on time, for profit, of course, to retain existing customers in the services being rendered and bring in more customers for more expansion. To achieve this, we need a pipeline specifically for this purpose. On the other hand, it's essential to have a system or an infrastructure where these application deployments will be hosted. Additionally, there's a need for an infrastructure pipeline where we can constantly make changes to the infrastructure to host the deployed applications better. Whether you're a Cloud DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, or Cloud enthusiast, understanding the pipelines for application deployments and infrastructure is essential.

What is an Application Pipeline?

An application pipeline is a pipeline that deploys the application code with which the users interact. This pipeline also includes the frontend and backend components, making it a safe channel for deployment. Here are the other? entities needed in the pipeline:??

• Dependencies: This ensures that the imported libraries and frameworks are properly installed and configured
• Testing: This ensures that the application functions as expected by running automated tests
• Build: This section compiles and packages the code into deployable artifacts that are worthy of getting to production
• Deployment: The pipeline pushes the compiled code into the target environment, whether testing, pre-production, or production environment.
• Configuration: Here, the application's environment-specific configurations are set to run correctly in each deployment environment.?

What is an Infrastructure Pipeline?

An infrastructure pipeline is a pipeline that deploys the structure upon which the application code deployed from the application pipeline will be hosted, managed, and monitored. Here are the components that the pipeline comprises of:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): The underlying infrastructure is deployed and managed through code. Tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Azure ARM templates are very useful in this aspect). The following includes servers, databases, networking, and other resources.
• Configuration Management: Setting up and configuring cloud resources such as servers, databases, load balancers, and other infrastructure components to support the web application
• Environment Provisioning: Creating and configuring environments needed in different stages of the development lifecycle, such as development, testing, UAT, and production.?

• Alerting and Notification: Setting up alerting mechanisms that will notify the principal managers of the pipeline regarding the status updates of the deployment stages. Having this information at the right time will improve faster review and remediation of errors.?

• Monitoring and Logging: Monitoring tools and logging mechanisms are set up to monitor the performance of the infrastructure.?

• Deployment Orchestration: Automating the deployment of pipeline changes alongside application deployments for consistency.

With the breakdown of what the application and infrastructure pipeline look like in terms of similarities and differences, let’s dive a bit deeper into the security mechanism of both pipelines.

Application Pipeline Security Best Practices

Here are the security measures that can be adopted in our application pipeline:

?1.? ? Access Control

• Restrict access to the pipeline environment.
• Grant permissions only to authorised employees using RBAC.?

• Adopt a regular review policy of updating access permissions.??

2. ? ? Protecting Credentials

• Hardcoding sensitive details such as Access keys, passwords and API keys in configuration files should be avoided.
• Regularly rotate credentials.

3. ? Code Scanning

• Static code analysis tools such as SonarCloud and SonarScanner should be integrated into the pipeline to identify bugs, code smells, and security vulnerabilities in the application code.
• Scan regularly for open-source dependencies with confirmed vulnerabilities.

4. Automated Testing

• Automated security testing should be conducted. Testing such as static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST).
• Security testing should be integrated into the pipeline to identify issues for easy remediation.

Infrastructure Pipeline Security Best Practices

Here are the security measures that can be adopted in our infrastructure pipeline:?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security

• Store IaC scripts securely and restrict access.
• Version control should be utilised to store and version the IaC scripts and review changes before deployment.
• Security vulnerabilities in IaC scripts should be scanned.

Secure Configuration

• Security best practices must be encouraged and applied in servers, database configurations, and other related components.
• Security concerns should be addressed regularly by auditing and updating configurations.

Secrets Management

• Securely rotate, manage, and store sensitive details such as passwords, Access, and API keys.
• Discourage hardcoding secrets in configuration files by adopting a dedicated secrets management tool.

Network Security

• Implement security measures at the network level, such as network segmentation and access control list components like firewalls.
• Encrypt data in transit using TLS/SSL.

Continuous Validation

• Adopt a regular security validation of the infrastructure by using automated tools.
• Penetration testing on the infrastructure perimeters should be implemented.

Conclusion

Pipelines are essential components needed to get our compiled codes securely deployed and hosted on a secure infrastructure with high availability and configured fault tolerance. In business, this synergy of a secure application and infrastructure pipeline will assure customers that their data is in good hands. With this, companies can make informed decisions regarding expanding the frontiers of their business operations by increasing revenue, lowering costs, and especially bringing in more customers onboard.