DevOps Governance
A CI/CD Approach & Framework for infrastructure that can be used in governance heavy organizations and is intended to give the developers as much autonomy as possible to do their work following DevOps & GitOps principles.
The DevOps Governance framework is an opinionated developer centric approach to infrastructure CI/CD with the enterprise governance taken into account.
In order to reduce friction in enterprise adoption it makes sense to look at the main stakeholders of a CI/CD system which are developers. The worst pain for developers is being blocked by bureaucratic processes and approvals. To create a certain level of agility in enterprise environments developers need to be enabled and autonomous as possible (DevOps principles).
One of these approaches to create this agility is to utilize a system like Gitlab or Github, which allows developers to define their pipelines in code and take ownership of their DevOps infrastructure pipelines. In enterprise environments we are however faced with regulations (NIST, ISO) and therefore need to also work with the security teams to make sure that we align on governance requirements.
By making use of Gitlab or Github (or any other tools that offer protected branches & pipeline as code), Workload Identity Federation, Gitflow we are able to cover the security teams requirements whilst at the same time giving the developers the required autonomy to do their work.
DevOps governance will give infrastructure teams the required flexibility whilst still adhering to security requirements with “guardrails”.
Guardrail Examples
To demonstrate how to enforce guardrails in Google Cloud we provide the Guardrail Examples:
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The Folder Factory sets guardrails in the form of organisational policies on folders.
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The Project Factory sets up projects for teams. For this it creates a deployment service account, links this to a Github repository and defines the roles and permissions that the deployment service account has.
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The Skunkworks - IaC Kickstarter is a template that can be used to give any new teams a functioning IaC deployment pipeline and repository structure.
Disclaimer
This is not an officially supported Google product.