The Big 3 of DevOps in 2023: Kubernetes, DevSecOps & Microservices Architecture

The good doctor Werner Vogels, that wild-eyed techno-wizard over at Amazon, laid it out for us in no uncertain terms: “Everything fails all the time.” And by God, he’s right. We’re living in a madhouse of code, a digital jungle where the beasts of software development lurk in every shadow, ready to pounce and devour the unwary.

It’s a savage land, and failure is the law of the jungle. But in this chaos, there are those who refuse to be devoured, who rise above the madness and turn the tables on the ravenous horde. Enter Kubernetes, DevSecOps, and Microservices Architecture — three musketeers of the digital age, armed to the teeth and ready for battle.

So let’s take a ride on the wild side, my friends. Let’s delve into the heart of darkness and explore the twisted terrain of DevOps in the year 2023.

The Importance of Kubernetes in DevOps

Kubernetes, commonly referred to as K8s, has emerged as a game-changing technology in the world of DevOps. As a container orchestration platform, Kubernetes has revolutionized the way organizations deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.

Its powerful features and capabilities have made it an indispensable tool for DevOps teams seeking to optimize their development and deployment processes. Kubernetes has become a foundational technology that enables organizations to achieve greater agility, efficiency, and reliability in their software delivery.

Key Points

• Automated Scaling—Kubernetes can automatically scale applications based on demand, ensuring optimal resource utilization and preventing performance degradation during peak loads.
• Resource Optimization—Kubernetes allows for efficient allocation and management of resources, enabling organizations to maximize the utilization of their infrastructure and reduce costs.
• Self-Healing—Kubernetes can detect and automatically replace failed containers, ensuring high availability and minimizing downtime.
• Extensibility—Kubernetes offers a rich ecosystem of extensions and plugins, allowing organizations to customize and enhance the platform to meet their specific needs.
• Multi-Cloud Support—Kubernetes provides a consistent and unified platform for deploying applications across multiple cloud providers, enabling organizations to leverage the best features of each cloud.

Case Study: Box’s Cloud Platform Transformation with Kubernetes

Box, an enterprise content management company founded in 2005, enables over 50 million users to manage and share content in the cloud. Initially, Box was built on bare metal within its own data centers using a monolithic PHP codebase.

As the company expanded globally, however, it faced the challenge of running workloads across different cloud infrastructures, including bare metal and public cloud. The varying interfaces of these clouds posed significant difficulties. Moreover, the company’s antiquated infrastructure resulted in long deployment times for new microservices, taking over six months for each deployment.

Solution

To address these challenges, Box began decomposing its monolithic infrastructure into microservices and adopted Kubernetes for container orchestration. Kubernetes provided a universal set of concepts that were portable across all cloud environments.

Sam Ghods, Cofounder and Services Architect of Box, was impressed by Kubernetes’ infrastructure-agnostic approach and its ability to run on bare metal and public cloud. The company also appreciated Kubernetes’ universal set of API objects, which provided a consistent surface for building tooling.

Impact

The adoption of Kubernetes had a transformative impact on Box’s infrastructure and development processes:

• Deployment Time Reduction—Before Kubernetes, deploying a new microservice took over six months. With Kubernetes, deployment time was reduced to less than five days, with a goal of further reducing it to an hour.
• Increased Agility—The use of Kubernetes led to an uptick in the number of microservices being released, reflecting pent-up demand for a better way of building software. Developers became more productive and made better architectural choices.
• Cloud Platform Vision—Ghods envisions Kubernetes as the new cloud platform, providing a consistent API across different cloud platforms, including bare metal. He believes that Kubernetes’ automation and infrastructure-agnostic approach will become the industry standard.

Box’s journey with Kubernetes began with small deployments, such as an API checker and job-processing daemons. The company then expanded to live services and increased the cluster size. Today, about five percent of Box’s computing runs on Kubernetes, with a goal of reaching 20 to 50 percent in the next six months.

Overall, Box’s adoption of Kubernetes was successful, and Ghods predicts that Kubernetes will become the industry standard for cloud infrastructure. He states, “Three to five years from now it’s really going to be shocking if you run your infrastructure any other way.”

Takeaways

Ghods offers two pieces of advice for companies undergoing similar transformations: 1) Deliver early and often, focusing on serving real production use cases, and 2) Keep an open mind about abstractions, interacting directly with native tools and building abstractions only when a practical need arises.

The Critical Role of DevSecOps in Modern Software Development

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving software development landscape, security has become a paramount concern for organizations of all sizes. Traditional approaches to security, which often involve addressing vulnerabilities late in the development process, are no longer sufficient to meet the growing challenges posed by cyber threats.

To address this need, the concept of DevSecOps has emerged as a holistic approach to integrating security practices into every stage of the software development life cycle. DevSecOps emphasizes the importance of “shifting security left,” ensuring that security considerations are an integral part of the development process from the very beginning.

Key Points

• Proactive Security — DevSecOps promotes a proactive approach to security, identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities early in the development process, reducing the risk of security breaches, and minimizing the impact of potential attacks.
• Collaboration and Culture — DevSecOps fosters a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for security among developers, operations teams, and security professionals. This collaborative approach helps break down silos and ensures that security is everyone’s responsibility.
• Automation and Continuous Monitoring — DevSecOps leverages automation tools to integrate security testing and monitoring into the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Automated security scans and tests are conducted regularly to detect vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with security standards.
• Compliance and Governance — DevSecOps helps organizations meet regulatory and industry-specific compliance requirements by incorporating security controls and best practices into the development process. This approach ensures that software products adhere to relevant security standards and regulations.

Case Study: Comcast’s DevSecOps Transformation Journey

Comcast, a leading telecommunications conglomerate, faced significant challenges in securing its software development process. The company’s traditional approach to security involved handing off software to a siloed application security team, which would “bolt on” security measures.

This process was time-consuming and interrupted the flow of development, undermining the effectiveness of DevOps practices. Moreover, the company experienced a high number of security incidents in production, underscoring the need for a more proactive and integrated approach to security.

Solution

To address these challenges, Comcast embarked on a DevSecOps transformation journey, led by Noopur Davis and Larry Maccherone, who had previously worked on a government-funded research initiative at Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute. The DevSecOps transformation aimed to empower software engineering teams to take ownership of security by building it into the development process from the start.

Comcast launched a small DevSecOps pilot program involving around 10 development teams that were already practicing true DevOps. These teams were equipped with automated security testing tools that integrated seamlessly with their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Additionally, each team was assigned a DevSecOps coach to guide them in adopting core security practices and gradually increasing the rigor of security scanning.

Impact

The adoption of DevSecOps had a transformative impact on Comcast’s software development process:

• Deployment Time Reduction—The integration of automated security testing tools into the CI/CD pipelines eliminated the need for handoffs to a separate application security team, streamlining the development process and reducing delays.
• Increased Agility—The DevSecOps transformation fostered a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, enabling development teams to take ownership of security and make better architectural choices.
• Security Incident Reduction—Teams practicing DevSecOps experienced an impressive 85% reduction in security incidents in production compared to their legacy counterparts.

Comcast’s DevSecOps transformation journey began with a small pilot program and gradually expanded to include more development teams. The company introduced a federated coaching program to train additional coaches and scale the program across the organization. Within five years, about half of Comcast’s 600 development teams had joined the DevSecOps transformation program, leading to the shutdown of the traditional AppSec program and a more efficient cybersecurity staffing model.

Overall, Comcast’s adoption of DevSecOps was a resounding success, resulting in significant improvements in security, agility, and efficiency. The company’s experience demonstrates the power of integrating security into the software development process and fostering a culture of shared responsibility for security.

Takeaways

Davis and Maccherone offer two pieces of advice for companies undergoing similar transformations: 1) Deliver early and often, focusing on serving real production use cases, and 2) Keep an open mind about abstractions, interacting directly with native tools and building abstractions only when a practical need arises.

Embracing Microservices Architecture in DevOps

In the modern era of software development, organizations are seeking ways to enhance agility, accelerate time-to-market, and improve scalability. One approach that has gained significant traction is the adoption of microservices architecture in DevOps practices.

Microservices architecture involves decomposing complex applications into smaller, independent components or services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This approach offers numerous benefits, including increased flexibility, better fault isolation, and the ability to leverage diverse technology stacks for different services.

Key Points

• Decoupled Components — Microservices architecture promotes the development of loosely coupled components that can be updated, deployed, and scaled independently. This decoupling reduces dependencies between components and allows for faster and more frequent releases.
• Scalability and Resilience — Microservices can be scaled horizontally, allowing organizations to allocate resources to specific services based on demand. Additionally, the failure of one microservice does not necessarily impact the entire application, enhancing overall system resilience.
• Continuous Integration and Deployment — Microservices architecture aligns well with DevOps practices, particularly continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Automated pipelines can be set up for each microservice, enabling rapid integration, testing, and deployment of changes.
• Polyglot Development — Microservices architecture allows development teams to choose the most suitable technology stack for each service, enabling the use of different programming languages, frameworks, and databases within the same application.

Case Study: CERN’s Winventory Microservices Architecture Transformation

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, manages a diverse range of licensed software assets, including Windows operating systems, office tools, and specialized technical and engineering software. The organization faced challenges in managing these assets and understanding user needs.

To address these challenges, CERN developed the Winventory application, a tool that gathers and presents statistics on software assets installed on CERN’s Windows machines. However, the organization needed a modern, maintainable, and extensible system for managing licensed software, which led to the adoption of a microservices architecture pattern for Winventory.

Solution

To achieve its goals, CERN embarked on a transformation journey to implement a microservices architecture for the Winventory system. The microservices architecture pattern involves breaking down the application into multiple independently deployable units, each with its own database and REST API.

The Winventory system comprises several backend services, including Applications, Polls, Identity, Notifications, and Users, each responsible for specific functionalities. The system also leverages asynchronous communication using a message broker (RabbitMQ) and the publish-subscribe pattern, as well as push notifications via a SignalR Hub. The architecture was designed to be technology agnostic, allowing the use of different frameworks (Flask and .NET Core) and programming languages (Python and C#) for different microservices.

Impact

The adoption of microservices architecture had a transformative impact on CERN’s Winventory system:

• Deployment Time Reduction—The independently deployable nature of microservices streamlined the development and deployment process, reducing delays and improving efficiency.
• Increased Agility—The microservices architecture fostered a culture of collaboration and innovation, enabling development teams to leverage existing knowledge and make better architectural choices.
• Enhanced Maintainability—The modular structure of microservices made it easier to maintain and update individual components of the Winventory system.

CERN’s microservices architecture transformation journey began with the goal of building a comprehensive inventory of software assets across the organization. The microservices architecture pattern was chosen to achieve this goal, enabling independent development, testing, and deployment of various components of the Winventory system.

Overall, CERN’s adoption of microservices architecture for the Winventory system was successful, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency, agility, and maintainability. The organization’s experience demonstrates the power of microservices architecture in building modern and extensible systems for managing complex software assets.

Takeaways

CERN offers two pieces of advice for organizations undergoing similar transformations: 1) Leverage the existing knowledge of development teams and select appropriate tools based on the problem to be solved, and 2) Focus on achieving loose coupling and asynchronous communication between microservices to enhance resilience and fault-tolerance.

The digital frontier is a treacherous place, a swirling vortex of madness and mayhem where the weak are swallowed whole and only the strong survive. Kubernetes, DevSecOps, and Microservices Architecture — these are the weapons of the fearless, the tools of the renegades who refuse to bow to the tyranny of convention. With these mighty instruments, the code warriors of the new age are conquering the complexities of the digital domain, fortifying their defenses, and scaling the heights of innovation.

As the mad prophet Werner Vogels once proclaimed, “Dance like nobody’s watching; encrypt like everyone is.” And so it is, my friends. In this dance of the damned, the denizens of the digital realm must move with wild abandon, reveling in the ecstasy of creation while guarding their secrets with a paranoid zeal. The journey of DevOps in 2023 is a twisted odyssey, a voyage into the heart of darkness where the only constant is change.

So strap in, buckle up, and hold on tight, for the road ahead is long and treacherous, and there’s no turning back.