DevOps Enabled Governance

The adoption of cloud computing has become a major disruptive force for organizations looking to innovate and grow. Embracing DevOps principles and culture is critical in keeping pace with cloud-native competitors. In a practical sense this means applying the same DevOps practices your teams use today and applying them to your overall collaborative governance strategy.  

Policy as Code (PaC) 

As your organization matures in its approach to adopting a cloud governance model, one area that’s ripe for improvement is how you manage your policy and initiative definitions. Azure Policy as Code combines DevOps CI/CD with Infrastructure as Code. Just as the practice of Infrastructure as Code changed the way deployment and configuration of your applications and infrastructure was managed, Policy as Code moves your governance, including implementing best security practices, adhering to compliance requirements and standards, and allocating business resources, away from a manual, human-based approach to a more consistent, efficient, and highly repeatable code-based approach.  

In general, the workflow looks like the following: 

Continuous Integration and Deployment 

The general workflow that was outlined for testing additions or changes to your Policy as Code definitions can also be setup as quality/compliance gates when running CI/CD pipelines to provision infrastructure or deploy applications. After the application or infrastructure deployment is provisioned into a test subscription or resource group, policy evaluation can be performed for that scope checking validation of all existing policies and initiatives. Applying this pattern to your build and release pipelines significantly shortens the feedback cycle and ensures early on that an application or infrastructure deployment is compliant with policy definitions. 

If your organization is interested in applying DevOps patterns and practices to their Azure governance strategy, InCycle can accelerate your adoption effort by implementing proven cloud governance and automated policy-driven solutions for your organization. Download our Azure Cloud Governance Playbook today.