I've been feeling overwhelmed with our cloud environment lately. It seems like developers are creating resources all over the place in different accounts and regions, which makes it really tough to maintain an accurate overview of what we have deployed. This lack of visibility not only causes me anxiety, but it also complicates our ability to secure these resources and manage costs. I'm looking for tried-and-true strategies to identify new deployments, track unmanaged assets, and ensure compliance with our security policies, but manually overseeing everything at scale just isn't feasible. What are some effective ways you've found to maintain visibility across your cloud infrastructure? I'm open to any tips or solutions!
6 Answers
One of the most effective strategies is to enforce Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. This means that nothing gets deployed without going through a proper pipeline, like a PR review and CI/CD validation. Limiting developer access mainly to log viewing can also mitigate chaos as you transition to better logging solutions around your applications.
If you're using Azure, governance mostly hinges on Azure Policy. Other cloud providers should ideally have similar tools, but definitely check if yours can offer comparable governance functionalities. That way, you can automate much of the oversight.
Using Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is crucial, especially in non-production environments. Only senior developers and platform admins should have permissions there, and consider using Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for production—many platforms, including AWS, can support this when configured correctly.
To tackle this issue, it's essential to rein in developer access. Implement strict controls like single developer tenancy, limit billing scopes, and set budget and region restrictions through the right tools. Although it might cause some friction with the development team, getting support from higher-ups, especially the finance department, can help push these changes through.
Creating a cloud center of excellence can help manage deployment chaos. However, be aware that some might perceive this approach as restrictive. It's vital to cultivate a leadership team that communicates the downsides of unmanaged cloud usage to foster understanding and implementation of better practices for the organization's benefit.
Letting developers have complete freedom in creating resources can seriously jeopardize a company—whether through soaring bills or security vulnerabilities. It's vital to impose strict limitations on their scope right away!
We've been through a similar situation without any budget controls and developers having contributor access. No one was tagging resources and when the bills skyrocketed, it became a nightmare to manage.