Understanding DevSecOps and Platform Engineering and How HashiCorp Can Help To Win The Race

Two terms often emerge as central pillars in the Software Product Engineering discipline: DevSecOps and Platform Engineering. While they share a common goal of improving software delivery and operational efficiency, they are distinct practices with unique focuses and methodologies. Understanding these differences is crucial for organizations aiming to optimize their workflows and achieve greater agility. The goal of this article is to underline why DevSecOps and Platform Engineering are different but complementary and how HashiCorp tools can help in both areas.

1. DevSecOps: Bridging Development, Security and Operations

DevSecOps is a cultural and technical movement that aims to unify software development (Dev), Security (Sec), and IT operations (Ops). The primary goal is to shorten the system development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently and reliably. DevOps emphasizes collaboration, communication, and integration between developers, security experts, and operations teams.

Key characteristics of DevSecOps:

• Cultural shift: DevOps promotes a culture of shared responsibility, collaboration, and open communication. It breaks down silos between development, security, and operations teams.
• Automation: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are cornerstones of DevOps, emphasizing automation in testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Toolchain integration: DevOps leverages a diverse set of tools for version control, configuration management, containerization, orchestration, and monitoring, creating an integrated toolchain that supports rapid development and deployment.
• Continuous improvement: Feedback loops are integral, enabling continuous improvement through practices like post-mortem analysis, monitoring, and iterative development.

2. Platform Engineering: Building the Foundation

On the other hand, Platform Engineering focuses on creating and maintaining a robust and scalable infrastructure that supports application development, deployment, and operation. Platform engineers build and maintain the underlying platforms and frameworks that developers use, abstracting the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.

Key characteristics of Platform Engineering:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Platform Engineering heavily relies on IaC to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure, ensuring consistency and repeatability.
• Scalability and reliability: The primary focus is on creating platforms that are scalable, reliable, and secure, supporting the needs of various development and operations teams.
• Self-service platforms: Platform engineers often build self-service portals and APIs, allowing developers to provision resources and deploy applications with minimal friction.
• Centralized platform and standardization: The Platform Engineering team establishes standards and best practices for infrastructure, applications, and access control. This ensures compliance, security, and performance across the organization. Furthermore, the platform facilitates cost management by enabling attribution to specific cost centers. Additionally, the centralized nature of the platform allows for complete auditability of the infrastructure and access controls, simplifying security compliance tasks.

3. Key Differences Between DevSecOps and Platform Engineering

To explain the main differences between DevSecOps and Platform Engineering, let's use a Formula 1 analogy. Imagine DevSecOps as a well-oiled pit crew. They work seamlessly together (communication!), leveraging the best tools (automation) provided as a service. This ensures the car (software) runs smoothly throughout the race (development lifecycle). They don't have to worry about choosing or configuring these tools – everything is pre-configured and readily available for them to use.

In this analogy, Platform Engineering is the team that builds and maintains the racetrack (platform). They design the track (infrastructure) to be safe, efficient, and adaptable to different car types (applications). They ensure the pit crew has the necessary equipment and resources (pre-configured tools) to perform their job flawlessly during pit stops (deployments).

4. The Power of Partnership Between DevSecOps and Platform Engineering

While distinct, DevSecOps and Platform Engineering work best when they complement each other. A robust platform built by platform engineers empowers the DevSecOps team to automate tasks and accelerate software delivery.

By understanding their unique roles, organizations can leverage both practices to achieve:

• Faster release cycles: Streamlined workflows and self-service platforms lead to quicker deployments.
• Improved developer experience: Developers can focus on building features instead of managing infrastructure.
• Increased efficiency: Automation frees up valuable time for teams to focus on innovation.

5. How HashiCorp Solutions Can Help?

#HashiCorp's suite of tools provides solutions for both DevSecOps and Platform Engineering teams. Terraform, for instance, enables infrastructure as code, allowing software engineers to automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration. #Consul and #Vault, on the other hand, empower platform engineers to build a secure and scalable platform by providing service discovery and secrets management solutions.

For fostering an internal developer platform (#IDP), HashiCorp #Waypoint can be a game-changer. Waypoint simplifies application deployment workflows by offering a unified experience across various cloud platforms. It integrates with tools like #Terraform to automate infrastructure provisioning alongside application deployment. This allows platform engineers to create standardized templates for deploying applications, while DevOps engineers can leverage Waypoint's automation capabilities to streamline application delivery. Additionally, HashiCorp Boundary specifically addresses the challenge of managing privileged access across environments, simplifying security, and improving collaboration.

Imagine a growing e-commerce company, ACME Retail. Their development teams are struggling to keep pace with the rising demand during peak seasons. Manual infrastructure provisioning and siloed security processes are creating bottlenecks, hindering agility and innovation. Here's how HashiCorp's suite of tools can help ACME Retail bridge the gap between DevOps and platform engineering, fostering a robust DevSecOps environment:

Challenge 1: Infrastructure Bottlenecks

• Pain point: Dev teams spend too much time manually configuring cloud infrastructure for each new application. This slows down deployment cycles and hinders scalability.
• Solution: Leverage the power of HashiCorp Terraform and HashiCorp Waypoint. Terraform allows them to use infrastructure as code (IaC) and no-code provisioning capabilities, creating reusable templates with Waypoint for various cloud environments. This enables them to build a self-service platform where developers can provision secure and compliant infrastructure with just a few clicks.
• Benefit: Developers gain faster access to the resources they need, accelerating application delivery. Platform engineers can focus on maintaining the platform and ensuring compliance.

Challenge 2: Inconsistent Security Practices

• Pain point: Security is often an afterthought, leading to vulnerabilities and potential breaches. Manually implementing security controls across different environments is cumbersome and error-prone.
• Solution: Leverage HashiCorp Vault to centralize secrets management. This ensures secure storage and access control for sensitive data like API keys and passwords. Additionally, they implement HashiCorp Consul to provide service discovery with built-in security features. However, centralized secrets management and service discovery are just pieces of the puzzle. Disparate privileged access management across environments remains a major security concern. To bridge this gap and simplify access control, HashiCorp Boundary provides a unified platform for managing privileged access across their entire infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud
• Benefit: Security becomes a seamless part of the development process, reducing risks and ensuring compliance.

Challenge 3: Fragmented Toolchain

• Pain point: Both teams rely on a mix of disparate tools for infrastructure management, deployments, and security. This complexity creates integration challenges and hinders visibility.
• Solution: Introduce HashiCorp Waypoint to unify application deployment workflows. This allows platform engineers to create standardized deployment templates that enforce best practices, golden patterns, and workflows.
• Benefit: A unified toolchain improves collaboration between DevOps and platform engineering. Streamlined deployments and centralized security management lead to greater efficiency and faster time-to-market.

6. Conclusion

In essence, while DevOps and platform engineering are complementary, they serve different purposes within the software delivery ecosystem. DevOps is about improving the collaboration and processes between development and operations, ensuring rapid and reliable delivery of software. Platform engineering is about creating the infrastructure and tools that make this possible, providing a stable and scalable foundation for these practices.

By understanding and leveraging both DevOps and platform engineering, organizations can achieve a more holistic approach to software delivery, combining speed, efficiency, and reliability. This dual approach enables teams to innovate faster while maintaining the stability and scalability needed to support their growth and success.

By adopting a multi-tool approach from HashiCorp, organizations can cover DevSecOps and Platform Engineering needs, fostering a secure and agile DevSecOps environment that empowers innovation. HashiCorp's suite of tools offers a powerful and cohesive solution, streamlining workflows, enhancing security, and empowering both DevSecOps and Platform Engineering teams.

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