Security as Code (SaC) is a crucial aspect of IaC that emphasizes integrating security practices into the entire life cycle of infrastructure provisioning and management. This approach ensures that security is not an afterthought but is considered from the very beginning. Let’s look at the key benefits:

  • Infrastructure security policies: Using IaC, you can define and document your organization’s security policies as code. These policies can include requirements for network configurations, data encryption, access controls, and compliance standards. By encoding security policies in code, you make them explicit and enforceable.
  • Automated security checks: You can also implement automated security checks within your IaC pipeline. These checks can include static code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and compliance audits. Automated tools can scan your IaC code for security issues and misconfigurations, helping you catch potential problems early in the development process.
  • Role-based access control (RBAC): You can also use code to define and enforce RBAC policies for your infrastructure resources. You can ensure that access permissions are based on the principle of least privilege (PoLP), where users or systems have only the permissions necessary to perform their specific tasks.
  • Secrets management: Using IaC, you can avoid hardcoding secrets in your IaC code. Instead, leverage secrets management tools and integrations to securely retrieve and inject secrets into your infrastructure at runtime.
  • Immutable infrastructure: You can also embrace the concept of immutable infrastructure, where instances are replaced instead of patched. When security vulnerabilities are identified, new instances with the latest security patches should be deployed automatically, reducing the window of vulnerability.

What is immutable infrastructure?

Immutable infrastructure is an approach to managing infrastructure where changes and updates are made by creating entirely new instances rather than modifying existing ones. This approach offers predictability, rollback safety, improved security, and consistency in deployments. It enhances infrastructure reliability and security by ensuring that each instance is a precise, unchangeable copy of the others, reducing the risk of configuration drift and vulnerabilities that can arise when modifying existing configurations. In combination with IaC, immutable infrastructure streamlines infrastructure management, making it more agile, secure, and reliable through automation and code-driven practices.