using a self-hosted runner without access keys, complex lambda functions, or Kubernetes clusters — GitHub actions allow automation of CI/CD pipelines to automate build and deployment. It provides the ability to run the pipeline operation on either GitHub-hosted VMs or self-hosted runners. Using self-hosted runners allows organizations to enforce some of the security controls like control overflow of code and build artifacts, and it…

Terraform has transitioned to a lingua franca for multi-cloud infrastructure as a code. Due to the sensitive content (depending on organization policies passwords, IP addresses, network structure, etc may be identified as sensitive information) stored as part of terraform plans and state, most organizations need to put additional controls to…

Balancing development flexibility with structured release process — Go modules have come a long way since the August 2018 when the first module capability was launched as part of version 2.11. Traditionally, the recommendation has been one repo = one module. But, I think, over the past year, the Go module tooling along with GOPROXY protocol and infrastructure…

Perform cost and time estimation with leveled resource without complex macros — Excel has proven to be a very versatile tool for solving a lot of different use-cases. …

Considerations for deploying and securing DevOps remote agents — Migration to DevOps culture with Continuous Integration and Delivery infrastructure is an important part of overall digital transformation within an organization. …

Learnings from large powershell based development — Powershell continues to be an important part of Microsoft ecosystem. Most of these learning are based on Microsoft documentations, few blogs and google and stack overflow searches. Please note that the focus of this article is on building complex packages and tools rather than a single file scripts. Modules Modules are…

Re-evaluating centralized provisioning and service accounts post-RMM supply-chain attacks — Recent ransomware attacks that used a compromised Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) platform to access and push the malicious executables to end-points is forcing security teams to re-evaluate such centralized platforms with very large blast radius. Such issues have again shown the need for the organizations to move to infrastructure…

History as a guide or distraction. — When you compare two things you get three things wrong — what you know about two things and reason for comparing two completely different things - note to self Over past few years every time I have tried to delve deep into the world of kubernetes (or K8), the haunting…

Part III: Developing secure applications — This article is part of Enterprise Cloud Security Series with Part I: Introduction introducing the space and how it differs from on-premise security. Part II: Foundation covers the security consideration for building the cloud foundation. Part III: Application Development focuses on building security into application development process.