Posts Tagged policy-as-code

This blog post summarizes a presentation by Dennis Sauvé at PulumiUP 2023. Washington Trust Bank, the largest independently-owned full-service commercial bank in the Northwest, has served personal, private, commercial and wealth management clients throughout the region since 1902. It has assets exceeding $11 billion and currently has 42 branches and offices in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. As an FDIC-governed financial institution, it is imperative for the bank to maintain secure, reliable, and compliant cloud resources to protect clients’ personal data.

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What is FinOps? The FinOps Foundation eloquently defines FinOps as “an evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.” Simply put, FinOps is the continuous effort to control cloud spend. Just as organizations have adopted operations-focused best practices into software development cycles and have considered how to best insert security best practices along the way, financial best practices may also be codified by developers writing cloud programs.

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As a reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard of the Pulumi Service, the default state-management backend of the Pulumi CLI, and if that’s the case, there’s a good chance you’ve also heard of many of its key features. But did you know we’re adding new features to the Service all the time—some of which are incredibly easy to miss? In this post, we’ll highlight a few of those lesser-known features that we think make it even easier to manage your infrastructure with Pulumi.

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Policies set the guardrails for your applications and infrastructure. They define many aspects of how your company manages its applications and infrastructure. Security, safe use of resources, and compliance with external standards are just a few examples of what a policy can define.

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Policies protect your infrastructure by controlling access, set limits that reduce the blast radius of an incident, and manage infrastructure operations. Policies are commonly created through a form on a cloud provider’s administrative console, making replicating or versioning the policy more difficult. With Policy as Code, you can apply software engineering practices such as automated testing, deployment, and version control when creating policies.

CrossGuard is Pulumi’s Policy as Code solution that lets you create, verify, apply, and enforce policies. Policies are standalone packages that can be run against any Pulumi stack. That means your policies are language agnostic and work with any language supported by Pulumi. Policy Packages are policy bundles that evaluate every resource in your stack, whether deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Kubernetes.

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We’re excited to announce the addition of Open Policy Agent (OPA) Rego language support to Pulumi’s CrossGuard policy-as-code framework. This enables Pulumi CrossGuard policy to be authored in either JavaScript/TypeScript/Python or in the popular Rego language using OPA.

Pulumi’s CrossGuard policy-as-code framework provides the ability to author, apply and enforce policy directly as part of your Pulumi deployments. With the new support for OPA Rego, CrossGuard supports a broad spectrum of policy authoring options, from expressive imperative languages to a popular industry-standard declarative policy language.

OPA-based rules for CrossGuard get all the core benefits of Pulumi’s policy-as-code framework - policies can be run on previews to get warnings about errors before you even deploy, policies can produce either advisory or mandatory recommendations allowing flexibility in flagging and enforcing policy violations, and policies can be applied and enforced across an entire organization through the Pulumi Service.

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Policy as Code for Python is now GA in Pulumi 2.0. Policies written in code let you test, automate deployment, and enable version control. Python is a popular scripting language used for machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, web development, and devops. It’s an ideal language for developers and operators to use in common.

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Writing infrastructure policy in a high-level programming language helps automate and enforce best practices. When policies are written with code, you can apply software development practices such as testing, automated deployment, and version control. Cloud providers typically offer a GUI to create policies, but creating policies is not easily repeatable, nor can you version policies. Moreover, policies must be tested against a live system, which means using an existing system or configuring and deploying an ephemeral version.

While the benefits of writing policies as code are evident for developers and operators, the organizational benefits are even more significant. Organizations can realize cost savings, improved compliance, efficient deployments, fine-grained control over infrastructure, and better use of cloud provider native resources. Let’s take a look at these benefits in-depth.

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In a previous blog post, I introduced CrossGuard, Pulumi’s Policy as Code solution. As part of our 2.0 release, CrossGuard is now generally available and has some awesome new features to improve the user experience around managing Policy Packs.

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AWS publishes best practices for how to tag your resources for cost tracking, automation, and organization. But how do you enforce that you’re doing it correctly across all of your projects? And is it really necessary to manually track down all those places where you missed a tag and manually patch things up? In this article, we’ll see how to use Policy as Code to enforce your team’s tagging strategies in addition to some powerful Infrastructure as Code techniques to automate applying your tags in a consistent way across all of your projects and resources.

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