Every client and customer cares deeply about security. Regardless of the domain, industry or specific application, when a workload is moved to or created in AWS, security and data protection are always important components of the architectural design. To meet these critical security requirements, organizations use AWS Control Tower and Landing Zones, which enable a secure and compliant foundation for your AWS environment.

Setting up an AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone

Setting up a Control Tower and Landing Zone for your enterprise applications can help mitigate many security risks and provide a consolidated and comprehensive view of your AWS landscape. AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone thoroughly propagate the concept of “define once and use across”. This enables you to set up a well-architected, multi-account environment in hours instead of weeks or months, utilizing best practice blueprints tailored to the organization’s needs.

As a security best practice, it is always recommended to have a multi-account approach, where accounts can be categorized based on application/environment/business-unit etc. This approach enhances security through segregation and isolation of workloads and data. This will also significantly reduce the surface attack area when there is a security compromise.

As your organization and customer needs grow, you will have a bunch of accounts to handle – that is when the Control Tower and Landing Zone comes to the rescue as it provides centralized control and policy management across the accounts.

Figure 1 here depicts how you can have all AWS accounts under AWS Organizations and tap on Control Tower features to enforce security and governance.

Setting up a Landing Zone is always one of the best approaches for customer applications running on multiple AWS accounts, if you want to ensure strict traffic inspection, central security logging, and cost savings.

Building a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower: Core concepts

Here are the core concepts at play while establishing a robust AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone foundational implementation.

Organizational Units: When it comes to planning Organizational Units (OUs), there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It should be based on the best way you can categorize your workloads.

For example, an enterprise company with numerous applications, business units and multiple environments (e.g. Dev/UAT/Prod) can be structured as shown below.

Service Control Policies/Guardrails: Service Control Policies (SCPs) are effectively a policy-driven preventive guardrail. AWS SCPs/guardrails provide organizations with robust tools for optimizing and centrally managing governance, security & compliance enforcement, permission management and operational efficiency. These features make them critical components of a well-architected multi-account strategy in AWS. We recommend you enable all the required guardrails as per industry standards. To get started with AWS Best Practice guardrails, you can refer to the official AWS guidance documentation found here.

You could also create a Test OU within which you can enable and test the effect of guardrails without impacting any production workloads. This is prudent when teams may be unaware of how an SCP guardrail may impact your team’s day to day activities.

Networking for Landing Zone: This is the most important part which often consumes a lot of time for planning. We recommend that organizations should plan for three different types of traffic flow:

• Ingress traffic: The Landing Zone should have a highly available firewall for ingress traffic inspection. Organizations can choose from a number of firewall appliances in the market today, including native AWS Network Firewall.
• Egress traffic: Plan for a central NAT gateway to manage all the egress traffic originating from workload VPCs from all AWS accounts and ensure it is being inspected using the firewall. This saves cost when all your workload VPCs use a central NAT gateway instead of individual NAT gateways for VPCs and enhances security through comprehensive monitoring with a holistic view.
• Inter-VPC traffic: Also referred to as East-West traffic, this is internal traffic between the VPCs within the AWS accounts. Best practice is to have inter-VPC traffic inspected using a firewall to detect internal threats, prevent data exfiltration etc. However, you can choose to ignore inspection for some VPCs – for example, those which require high throughput and require less latency.

We recommend you further define any other flows for your workloads and analyse its effects including latency, costs when it traverses transit gateway, or other cost incurring components.

Figure 3 here shows one of the ways you can design your architecture to achieve the above-mentioned traffic inspection and flows. It uses hub and spoke architecture using AWS transit gateway.

To read more about hub and spoke architecture refer to this AWS article here.

Logging and monitoring: Logs can be considered as a critical asset in any infrastructure. There are a number of different kinds like VPC flow logs, firewall logs, DNS logs, transit gateway attachment logs, application logs, and more. AWS Control Tower offers you a way to centrally store these logs in a separate “Log Archive” account. While AWS Control Tower has the capability to implement centralized storage, the responsibility of log ingestion implementation is allocated to the organization. The logs can be further ingested to other Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) platforms for analytics.

Putting things in motion

By continuously monitoring workload performance and analysing customer feedback, organizations can effectively adjust resources and processes to align with evolving customer needs, ensuring enhanced service delivery and operational efficiency.

AWS offers native service called AWS CloudWatch, to get you started with Logging and Monitoring – refer to this official AWS documentation. This should help you understand what AWS services’ logs can be centralized, among other important notes.

To sum up, using the AWS Control Tower service will unveil a holistic view of security and governance across all AWS accounts within the organization. Setting up a Landing Zone makes it easier to have total control on all of the traffic entering and exiting your AWS accounts. This will significantly reduce the surface attack area and can efficiently create a scalable architecture and ensure security best practices.

For additional Design Consultation and Cloud Engineering support, Cloud Kinetics currently offers a refined AWS Secure Landing Zone (SLZ) implementation, available here via AWS Marketplace. You can also get in touch with us directly here.

The post AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone: Architecture & Best Practices appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Participants joined AWS, Snyk and Cloud Kinetics for a deep dive into shifting security left and enhancing the security of their containers and infrastructure as code (IaC).

This workshop also offered hands-on with Amazon Inspector, a native vulnerability management service, and Snyk’s developer security tools that can help find and automatically fix vulnerabilities in code, dependencies and containers.

Keynote speakers explained how these tools could improve the security of containers deployed on AWS and how to use AWS and Snyk tools to develop more securely.

Speakers:

Kimberly Dickson

Security Solutions Architect
AWS

Abhijit Neelgar

Director of Alliances and Channel Sales
Snyk

Nidhi Mishra

Senior Channel Solutions Engineer
Snyk

The post DevSecOps Workshop With AWS, Snyk And Cloud Kinetics appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

By migrating to the cloud, organizations gain cost efficiency, higher scalability and flexibility, better security and increased disaster recovery capabilities. The evolving synergy between cloud services and DevOps culture has redefined the way organizations approach migrations. Adopting the DevOps culture during migration ensures a smooth transition to the cloud and helps organizations reach their goals at a quicker pace.

Benefits of adopting a DevOps culture during migration

Greater collaboration and communication

Adopting the DevOps culture reduces silos and boosts information flow between teams. It ensures that everyone involved in the process is aligned on the business objectives and goals. DevOps encourages the implementation of feedback loops so that development improves continuously. Issues can be identified and resolved quickly making it easy for organizations to deliver high quality software. Further, automation enables teams to focus more on innovation and less on repetitive tasks.

Better quality and reliability

DevOps practices such as CI/CD helps organizations deliver software of higher quality, resilience and reliability. CI/CD ensures that there is no downtime even during migration. DevOps emphasizes on automation and testing so that code can be continuously integrated and deployed, effectively reducing the time required to deploy new features and updates.

Higher visibility and transparency

DevOps focuses on continuous monitoring of systems thereby effectively providing real-time visibility into system health. Data-driven decisions can be taken easily. Automated testing during the development phase provides visibility into code quality and helps ensure applications work as they should throughout the development phase. Greater collaboration between teams promotes transparency and makes it easier to resolve issues and share all necessary information.

Cost savings

By boosting efficiency, reducing waste and optimizing the delivery process, DevOps culture increases cost savings. Lower infrastructure costs and faster time-to-market promotes profitability. DevOps practices help organizations quickly adjust their resources to meet demands efficiently and also to ensure that the resources are used efficiently, both of which can help reduce migration costs.

Higher security

The ability to identify and address issues in real time includes security issues too. Automated vulnerability scanning, security testing and compliance checks all work together to reduce chances of security breaches. Since resources can be managed consistently and centrally, it becomes easier to enforce security policies. Further, DevOps culture promotes implementation of automated failover mechanisms so that applications can continue to operate even when there are security breaches.

How AWS and DevOps complement each other

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a robust platform with multiple features that align seamlessly with DevOps principles. They include:

Infrastructure management

AWS enables Infrastructure as Code (IaC), a core principle of DevOps. Services like AWS CloudFormation enables infrastructure provisioning to become code-driven and automated. This IaC approach allows teams to manage and replicate environments consistently, reducing manual errors and accelerating migration timelines. During migration, AWS Elastic Beanstalk handles the deployment of code automatically, and takes care of capacity provisioning, auto-scaling, load balancing and application health monitoring.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)

The AWS ecosystem aligns perfectly with the DevOps focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery. AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy enable teams to set up automated pipelines that integrate code changes seamlessly, run tests, and deploy applications reliably. This CI/CD automation not only speeds up the migration process but also improves deployment accuracy, effectively reducing manual errors.

Serverless architecture and microservices

Adopting a serverless architecture on AWS offers scalability and cost-efficiency. By breaking down applications into microservices, teams can deploy, scale, and manage components independently. AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and Amazon ECS empower organizations to create agile and modular systems that align with the DevOps principles of rapid iteration and quick customer feedback.

Automated testing and monitoring

AWS provides a range of tools for automated testing and monitoring. AWS CloudWatch enables collecting and tracking metrics, real-time monitoring and logging, all of which help teams identify performance bottlenecks. Services like AWS X-Ray and AWS Trusted Advisor help developers trace application behaviour and ensure best practices are implemented during the migration. Issues and errors can be identified and resolved.

Security and compliance

DevOps migration on AWS focuses significantly on security. AWS offers a robust set of tools, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key Management Service (KMS), to manage access and encryption. Compliance frameworks are also supported, making it easier to adhere to industry standards during the migration process.

Collaboration and visibility

AWS fosters collaboration among cross-functional teams, another key facet of DevOps. AWS Organizations allows centralized management of multiple AWS accounts, promoting collaboration while maintaining security boundaries. Additionally, AWS CloudTrail provides visibility into API actions, helps in auditing and troubleshooting.

Cost optimization

The pay-as-you-go model of AWS aligns with DevOps’ efficiency goals. By leveraging services like AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, organizations can monitor and optimize their cloud spending during migration and beyond, ensuring cost-effectiveness while following DevOps principles.

The post Migrating To An Effective DevOps Culture With AWS appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

True, every step of a CI/CD pipeline can be executed manually, but it is automation that shows its true value. Meanwhile, pipelines are predefined tasks that decide what needs to be completed and when. Tasks are usually executed in parallel to accelerate delivery. A typical CI/CD pipeline includes stages where code is pushed to the repository and stored, code changes trigger the build, which is tested and then deployed to the production environment.

Enabling CI/CD pipeline for container-based workloads

• CI/CD, a DevOps strategy: CI/CD is a DevOps tactic, in fact it is the backbone of the DevOps methodology, which brings together developers and IT operations teams to deploy software. CI/CD facilitates DevOps teams with a single repository to keep automation tools and store work so that the code can be continuously integrated and tested for quality.
• Containerization, a DevOps tool: In containerization, all the components of an application – the software, its environment, dependencies and configuration – are bundled into a single isolated unit called a container. Each unit can be deployed in its own space on a shared operating system, on any computing environment, on-premise or on the cloud. Containers are lightweight and portable, and very conducive to automation. Containers and orchestration tools facilitate CI and CD.
• Docker, a containerization solution: Docker is a containerization solution used widely in DevOps and workflows. It is an open source platform that allows developers to quickly and easily build, deploy, update, run and manage containers. Docker makes it easy to decouple apps from their surroundings and it also contains a collection of container images that can be used for development.

Common use cases for containerization workloads

• Modernizing legacy application development practices to container-based platforms
• Moving pipelines and workflows across multiple microservices and applications with ease
• Providing DevOps support for CI/CD
• DevOps enables compliance with industry standards and organizational policies while shipping releases faster to production.
• Minimizing errors during the build, deploy, test, and release process of a new software release
• Providing easier deployment of repetitive tasks. 

CI/CD pipeline architecture

DevOps with containers: The workflow

1. After coding, developers push the code to a shared repository such as GitHub. Frequently merging the code and validating it is one way to ensure CI is error-free. To start the process, a GitHub webhook triggers a Jenkins project build. When code changes are made and committed to the repository, the pipeline gets activated. It downloads the code and triggers a build process. 
2. In this step, the code is compiled, artifacts are built, dependencies are sorted out and stored in the repository. Environments are created, containers are built and images are stored for roll out. This is followed by the testing processes. The Jenkins build job uses a dynamic build agent in AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to perform a container build process.
3. A container image is created from the code in source control and is then pushed to an AWS/Docker Container Registry. 
4. Using the process of CD, Jenkins deploys an updated container image to the Kubernetes cluster.
5. The web application uses Dynamo DB as its back end. Both Dynamo DB and AWS EKS report metrics to the AWS Monitor.
6. A Grafana instance provides visual dashboards of the application performance based on the data from AWS Monitor.

Containerization infrastructure and configuration as code

The true power of containers becomes visible when orchestrating with Kubernetes and DevOps pipelines can be automated in better ways. Kubernetes is a portable open source platform used to manage containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both automation and declarative configuration. YAML, a data-serialization language frequently used for writing configuration files, is utilised in Kubernetes deployments and resources. Its advantage is that YAML files can be created and stored in a Git repository and all changes can be tracked and audited. 

• Continuous deployment pipeline with no downtime: The objective of the pipeline is to perform a set of tasks that will deploy a fully tested and functional service or application to production. The need for frequent deployments is handled best by Kubernetes via its container orchestration mechanism.
• Easy rollbacks: The Kubernetes framework has  a built-in rollback mechanism. When new code is ready to be pushed to a container, the new desired state is defined, and Kubernetes orchestrates creating new containers and removing existing ones. If a problem arises, the immutable nature of Kubernetes containers allows easy rollbacks to the previous state.
• On-demand infrastructure: Kubernetes, through the use of the configurations, can easily scale infrastructure up and down based on the resources needed to handle the workloads of the application. And it is elastic by nature.
• Run everywhere pipelines: With Kubernetes architecture, we can easily migrate Containers and pipelines to anywhere in the same cloud or all on-premises.

Containerization features

• Availability: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)  operates and scales the Kubernetes control plane across many AWS availability zones to offer high availability. As part of the Amazon Kubernetes Service cluster, application traffic is distributed to one or more containers (pods) that run the application as individual microservices. This approach to running containerized applications in Kubernetes provides a highly available infrastructure for the applications.
• Scalability: Amazon EKS makes it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises. It automatically allows scaling of the number of cluster’s worker nodes to meet the application’s workload demands. As the application size increases, the EKS cluster can scale up the number of Kubernetes nodes.
• Resiliency: Amazon EKS is built into the Kubernetes architecture and its components are resilient by nature. Kubernetes components monitor and restart the containers (pods) if there is any issue. Combined with running multiple Kubernetes nodes, applications can tolerate a pod or node being unavailable.

Security and security threats in containers

Container security is an important part of a complete security assessment. It involves the practice of protecting the containerized environment and applications from potential risks and threats by implementing a combination of security policies and tools.

• Access and authorization exploits: Providing access to authorized users and blocking all other users accessing the platform. And encrypting K8’s configuration files (for example, web. config and appsettings.json), particularly in a containerized setup.
• Container image vulnerabilities: Security mechanism to prevent malicious attacks is the key.

Detecting code vulnerabilities, outdated packages, malicious code, and other harmful threats during the build stage can improve security dramatically. 

Monitoring CI/CD pipelines, end-to-end

• Monitor health of the CI/CD build pipeline and set up cognitive, proactive alerts spanning various tools
• Assess performance and quality of deployments in a unified way across multiple tools
• Monitoring the pipeline performance and reporting issues combines Amazon Monitoring Service (CloudWatch) with Grafana for visual dashboards; or extending build pipeline monitoring to include application monitoring (Nagios) and container monitoring (Kubernetes).

The post CI/CD Pipeline For <br>Container-Based Workloads: <br>A DevOps Strategy appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Why DevOps for our customers

Our Enterprise DevOps consulting services help organizations achieve higher efficiency in Development and Operations, quicker time to market, rapid delivery, reliable and better quality of software builds. With early identification of emerging development issues, always let the code be in a releasable state with minimal effort and automating the process. And incorporating all DevOps capabilities and cultures: collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, monitoring, and rapid remediation.

DevOps benefits your organization in many ways:

• Increased efficiency among IT groups
• faster development and deployment
• Automation of build and deployments
• Faster go to the market for software
• Quick feedback implements
• No downtime of deployment
• Improvement to the whole software delivery pipeline and practices through builds, validations, and deployment
• Modernized development processes through increased responsibility and code ownership

Why Cloud Kinetics for DevOps

Our DevOps solutions help customers align with the goals fast and reliably, and streamline the development and operations processes to achieve a faster time to market.

• Specialized DevOps Center of Excellence
• Large multi-cloud customer references in Asia
• Centralized, shared services model offers better value
• DevOps compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management
• Usage of infrastructure as code and policy as code

Cloud Kinetics’ DevOps approach

CK’s DevOps approach orchestrates all DevOps tools, CI/CD processes, automates infrastructure, and streamlines operations, facilitating Infra/Dev/Ops/QA/Security communication. And practices that need to accelerate software delivery.

CI/CD Tools Canvas

DevOps is a method of build and deploying applications, it requires the right IT team and right tools to create. Generally, for the DevOps practice, we rely on the CI/CD pipelines, containers, and cloud-native tools. And can be extended to open source, proprietary, or supported distributions of open source technology.

Code repository – Code repositories enable multiple developers to work on code coupled with version control enabled. Tools used for source code management include AWS CodeCommit, and opensource tools such as Git and GitHub.

CI/CD pipelines – The continuous integration tool initializes CI-CD processes to create, test, and validate code in a shared repository. Mostly automating the manual work. Tools used for CI/CD pipelines include AWS CodePipeline and opensource tools such as Jenkins.

Continuous delivery – extends the automatic steps through production-level tests and configuration setups for release management. Tools used for continuous delivery include a combination of AWS CodePipeline & AWS CodeBuild and opensource tools such as Jenkins.

Continuous Deployment – Invoking tests, configuration, and provisioning, as well as monitoring and potential rollback capabilities. Tools used for continuous delivery include AWS CodeDeploy and opensource tools such as GitLab, Chef, and CircleCI.

The post Efficient, Easy And Effective: DevOps With Cloud Kinetics appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

The Internet – and bandwidth availability – have become essential services; without them, businesses and government agencies cannot function. It’s even more challenging in large and growing economies like Indonesia, which comprises 17,000 islands and 273 million people, the bulk of whom are just about coming online for work and play.

The only feasible option was to leverage the cloud.

“An organization of our scale needed a robust ICT infrastructure for our business. But our legacy systems were unable to cope with the rapid rise in demand across the vast geography. We needed a solution that could be available anywhere, anytime, and on any connected device. We also needed expertise to help us transition,” the CIO said.

The agency assessed all the available solutions and finally picked the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud. The agency’s IT experts were satisfied that they would be able to start quickly with single-click clusters and scale up to 15,000 nodes. Apps development could be speeded up without sacrificing data and cybersecurity. They just needed an implementer to get them started.

That’s where Cloud Kinetics came in. Cloud Kinetics set up a secure, high-speed infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and optimized the agency’s apps, workloads and processes on GKE. Security and budget were of critical importance.

“We built a high-speed, powerful infrastructure that could scale up to meet the rising infrastructure demands of the client while keeping costs under control,” Ted A, Cloud Kinetics’ Chief Revenue Officer, said. “We helped host their applications, their database clusters, legacy workloads, tools, web content, backups, and static files.”

Why GCP?

GCP allows businesses to run apps wherever they are needed. With the combined commitment of GCP and Cloud Kinetics to open source, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms, vendor lock-in can be avoided. Companies can run their workloads on any cloud or environment. GCP open cloud solutions provide consistency between public and private clouds, helping businesses modernize and deploy apps faster.

GCP can be used to develop a variety of apps with support for stateful, serverless, and application accelerators.

“We could also use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools to secure and speed up each stage of the app lifecycle. Application development can be speeded up without sacrificing security,” said Ted

Why Cloud Kinetics?

Cloud Kinetics is a premier GCP managed services provider (MSP). The Cloud Kinetics team in Indonesia, and outside, has the capabilities, the certifications, and the talent to migrate, manage and maintain a range of services and solutions for the funding agency.

The Indonesian market: View forward

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country with a huge population of Internet users. It is a hot spot for global tech companies keen to get into one of Asia’s fastest-growing data markets. The country’s trend toward data localization is a major draw. Google has been offering services such as data storage, security and big data analytics to institutional and individual customers in Indonesia using data centres of local partners. The shift now gives customers faster service, which end-users like banks can use to serve its customers.

The post How A Funding Agency Met Rising Customer Demands With Scalable Cloud Infrastructure appeared first on Cloud Kinetics.

Cloud managed services are often subscription-based, which makes them scalable and cost-efficient compared to in-house management. They cover everything from migration and security to backup and disaster recovery and are provisioned by external cloud managed services providers (MSPs), which provide end-to-end solution management. This creates a more robust IT infrastructure that is constantly up-to-date and enables businesses to free up critical resources for use in other areas.

Optimize your cloud-based business with managed services

Cloud migration

Shifting the whole IT infrastructure of a business to the cloud can be a daunting prospect, especially for first-time cloud adopters and for companies whose resources are spread across multiple locations. This is where an experienced cloud MSP can be a significant asset as they can ensure that everything is correctly migrated and minimize operational downtime.

One of our clients, a leading e-portal company, needed to migrate to the cloud to upgrade their resources and improve network performance but faced potential compliance issues due to the geographical spread of their resources. Cloud Kinetics was able to use the ARMS Platform Plan and the Arcus automated migration toolkit to simplify the migration process and make it more efficient, which resulted in an error-free resource migration with minimal downtime.

Cloud consulting

While there are many ways that the cloud can help a business resolve its pain points, it is up to the business to identify those needs and implement the right solutions.

Cloud MSPs can provide assessments by and consultations with cloud experts top in point core business needs and match them to the appropriate cloud services based on resources and budget. They can also help businesses develop a cloud strategy and roadmap for long-term implementation, ensuring that companies continue to optimize their cloud in the years to come.

Cloud security

The sheer volume of digital resources and mission-critical assets now on the cloud means that cloud security must be of paramount importance to businesses.

Instead of hiring teams for round-the-clock security monitoring, companies can outsource their cloud and data security to MSPs. With experts covering continuous monitoring, in-depth security analyses and rapid response full-time, they can eliminate single points of failure within the cloud environment and quickly mitigate any potential threats at a fraction of the cost of creating a full in-house team.

DevOps solutions

A portmanteau of Development (Dev) & IT Operations (Ops), DevOps is an amalgamation of tools and practices to elevate a business’s efficiency – and DevOps adoption is accelerated by the cloud.

Cloud MSPs can support organizations in DevOps adoption by facilitating integration, such as by installing a shared data drive for the business within a cloud network. This creates a highly collaborative operational environment with reduced communication lag time in communication and more streamlined operations.

Cloud disaster recovery

Businesses can no longer afford to be unprepared for any major IT downtime or data loss arising from unexpected disasters. Cloud services such as cloud disaster recovery can minimize the impact of any unforeseen events and prevent significant fallout.

MSPs provide disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) for the cloud, which involves backing up and replicating a business’ systems and data to a private or public cloud. This creates a failsafe process and helps to ensure business continuity if the worst happens, which can save businesses millions in lost revenue and protect their reputation.

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