When developing modern applications, we almost immediately think about wrapping our application components inside Containers — it may not be the only architectural alternative, but a very common one.

Assuming our developers and DevOps teams have the required expertise to work with Containers, we still need to think about maintaining the underlying infrastructure — i.e., the Container hosts.

If our application has a steady and predictable load, and assuming we do not have experience maintaining Kubernetes clusters, and we do not need the capabilities of Kubernetes, it is time to think about an easy and stable alternative for deploying our applications on top of Containers infrastructure.

In the following blog post, I will review the alternatives of running Container workloads on top of Serverless infrastructure.

Why do we need Serverless infrastructure for running Container workloads?

Container architecture is made of a Container engine (such as Docker, CRI-O, etc.) deployed on top of a physical or virtual server, and on top of the Container engine, we deploy multiple Container images for our applications.

The diagram below shows a common Container architecture:

If we focus on the Container engine and the underlying operating system, we understand that we still need to maintain the operating system itself.

Common maintenance tasks for the operating system:

• Make sure it has enough resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network connectivity) for running Containers
• Make sure the operating system is fully patched and hardened from external attacks
• Make sure our underlying infrastructure (i.e., Container host nodes), provides us with high availability in case one of the host nodes fails and needs to be replaced
• Make sure our underlying infrastructure provides us the necessary scale our application requires (i.e., scale out or in according to application load)

Instead of having to maintain the underlying host nodes, we should look for a Serverless solution, that allows us to focus on application deployment and maintenance and decrease as much as possible the work on maintaining the infrastructure.

Comparison of Serverless Container Services

Each of the hyperscale cloud providers offers us the ability to consume a fully managed service for deploying our Container-based workloads.

Below is a comparison of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud alternatives:

Side notes for Azure users

While researching for this blog post, I had a debate about whether to include Azure Containers Apps or Azure Container Instances.

Although both services allow customers to run Containers in a managed environment, Azure Container Instances is more suitable for running a single Container application, while Azure Container Apps allows customers to build a full microservice-based application.

Summary

In this blog post, I have compared alternatives for deploying microservice architecture on top of Serverless Container services offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP.

While designing your next application based on microservice architecture, and assuming you don’t need a full-blown Kubernetes cluster (with all of its features and complexities), consider using Serverless Container service.

References

• Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate
• Azure Container Apps overview
• What is Google Cloud Run

About the Author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, and the author of the book Cloud Security Handbook, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. You can connect with him on Twitter.

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.

Using modern cloud environments, specifically production environments, decreases the need for human access.

It makes sense for developers to have access to Dev or Test environments, but in a properly designed production environment, everything should be automated – from deployment, and observability to self-healing. In most cases, no human access is required.

Production environments serve customers, require zero downtime, and in most cases contain customers’ data.

There are cases such as emergency scenarios where human access is required.

In mature organizations, this type of access is done by the Site reliability engineering (SRE) team.

The term break-glass is an analogy to breaking a glass to pull a fire alarm, which is supposed to happen only in case of emergency.

In the following blog post, I will review the different alternatives each of the hyperscale cloud providers gives their customers to handle break-glass scenarios.

Ground rules for using break-glass accounts

Before talking about how each of the hyperscale cloud providers handles break-glass, it is important to be clear – break-glass accounts should be used in emergency cases only.

• Authentication – All access through the break-glass mechanism must be authenticated, preferred against a central identity provider, and not using local accounts
• Authorization – All access must be authorized using role-based access control (RBAC), following the principle of least privilege
• MFA – Since most break-glass scenarios require highly privileged access, it is recommended to enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for any interactive access
• Just-in-time access  – All access through break-glass mechanisms must be granted temporarily and must be revoked after a pre-define amount of time or when the emergency is declared as over
• Approval process – Access through a break-glass mechanism should be manually approved
• Auditing – All access through break-glass mechanisms must be audited and kept as evidence for further investigation
• Documented process – Organizations must have a documented and tested process for requesting, approving, using, and revoking break-glass accounts

Handling break-glass scenarios in AWS

Below is a list of best practices provided by AWS for handling break-glass scenarios:

Identity Management

Identities in AWS are managed using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

When working with AWS Organizations, customers have the option for central identity management for the entire AWS Organization using AWS IAM Identity Center – a single-sign-on (SSO) and federated identity management service (working with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, and more).

Since there might be a failure with a remote identity provider (IdP) or with AWS IAM Identity Center, AWS recommends creating two IAM users on the root of the AWS Organizations tree, and an IAM break-glass role on each of the accounts in the organization, to allow access in case of emergency.

The break-glass IAM accounts need to have console access, as explained in the documentation.

Authentication Management

When creating IAM accounts, enforce the use of a strong password policy, as explained in the documentation.

Passwords for the break-glass IAM accounts must be stored in a secured vault, and once the work on the break-glass accounts is over, the passwords must be replaced immediately to avoid reuse.

AWS recommends enforcing the use of MFA for any privileged access, as explained in the documentation.

Access Management

Access to resources inside AWS is managed using AWS IAM Roles.

AWS recommends creating a break-glass IAM role, as explained in the documentation.

Access using break-glass IAM accounts must be temporary, as explained in the documentation.

Auditing

All API calls within the AWS environment are logged into AWS CloudTrail by default, and stored for 90 days.

As best practices, it is recommended to send all CloudTrail logs to a central S3 bucket, from the entire AWS Organization, as explained in the documentation.

Since audit trail logs contain sensitive information, it is recommended to encrypt all data at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (as explained in the documentation) and limit access to the log files to the SOC team for investigation purposes.

Audit logs stored inside AWS CloudTrail can be investigated using Amazon GuardDuty, as explained in the documentation.

Resource Access

To allow secured access to EC2 instances, AWS recommends using EC2 Instance Connect or AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.

To allow secured access to Amazon EKS nodes, AWS recommends using AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent).

To allow secured access to Amazon ECS container instances, AWS recommends using AWS Systems Manager, and for debugging purposes, AWS recommends using Amazon ECS Exec.

To allow secured access to Amazon RDS, AWS recommends using AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.

Handling break-glass scenarios in Azure

Below is a list of best practices provided by Microsoft for handling break-glass scenarios:

Identity Management

Although Identities in Azure are managed using Microsoft Entra ID (formally Azure AD), Microsoft recommends creating two cloud-only accounts that use the *.onmicrosoft.com domain, to allow access in case of emergency and case of problems log-in using federated identities from the on-premise Active Directory, as explained in the documentation.

Authentication Management

Microsoft recommends enabling password-less login for the break-glass accounts using a FIDO2 security key, as explained in the documentation.

Microsoft does not recommend enforcing the use of MFA for emergency or break-glass accounts to prevent tenant-wide account lockout and exclude the break-glass accounts from Conditional Access policies, as explained in the documentation.

Access Management

Microsoft allows customers to manage privileged access to resources using Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM) and recommends assigning the break-glass accounts permanent access to the Global Administrator role, as explained in the documentation.

Microsoft Entra PIM allows to control of requests for privileged access, as explained in the documentation.

Auditing

Activity logs within the Azure environment are logged into Azure Monitor by default, and stored for 90 days.

As best practices, it is recommended to enable diagnostic settings for all audits and “allLogs” and send the logs to a central Log Analytics workspace, from the entire Azure tenant, as explained in the documentation.

Since audit trail logs contain sensitive information, it is recommended to encrypt all data at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (as explained in the documentation) and limit access to the log files to the SOC team for investigation purposes.

Audit logs stored inside a Log Analytics workspace can be queried for further investigation using Microsoft Sentinel, as explained in the documentation.

Microsoft recommends creating an alert when break-glass accounts perform sign-in attempts, as explained in the documentation.

Resource Access

To allow secured access to virtual machines (using SSH or RDP), Microsoft recommends using Azure Bastion.

To allow secured access to the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) API server, Microsoft recommends using Azure Bastion, as explained in the documentation.

To allow secured access to Azure SQL, Microsoft recommends creating an Azure Private Endpoint and connecting to the Azure SQL using Azure Bastion, as explained in the documentation.

Another alternative to allow secured access to resources in private networks is to use Microsoft Entra Private Access, as explained in the documentation.

Handling break-glass scenarios in Google Cloud

Below is a list of best practices provided by Google for handling break-glass scenarios:

Identity and Access Management

Identities in GCP are managed using Google Workspace or using Google Cloud Identity.

Access to resources inside GCP is managed using IAM Roles.

Google recommends creating a dedicated Google group for the break-glass IAM role, and configuring temporary access to this Google group as explained in the documentation.

The temporary access is done using IAM conditions, and it allows customers to implement Just-in-Time access, as explained in the documentation.

For break-glass access, add dedicated Google identities to the mentioned Google group, to gain temporary access to resources.

Authentication Management

Google recommends enforcing the use of MFA for any privileged access, as explained in the documentation.

Auditing

Admin Activity logs (configuration changes) within the GCP environment are logged into Google Cloud Audit logs by default, and stored for 90 days.

It is recommended to manually enable data access audit logs to get more insights about break-glass account activity, as explained in the documentation.

As best practices, it is recommended to send all Cloud Audit logs to a central Google Cloud Storage bucket, from the entire GCP Organization, as explained in the documentation.

Since audit trail logs contain sensitive information, it is recommended to encrypt all data at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (as explained in the documentation) and limit access to the log files to the SOC team for investigation purposes.

Audit logs stored inside Google Cloud Audit Logs can be sent to the Google Security Command Center for further investigation, as explained in the documentation.

Resource Access

To allow secured access to Google Compute Engine instances, Google recommends using an Identity-Aware Proxy, as explained in the documentation.

To allow secured access to Google App Engine instances, Google recommends using an Identity-Aware Proxy, as explained in the documentation.

To allow secured access to Google Cloud Run service, Google recommends using an Identity-Aware Proxy, as explained in the documentation.

To allow secured access to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) instances, Google recommends using an Identity-Aware Proxy, as explained in the documentation.

Summary

In this blog post, we have reviewed what break-glass accounts are, and how AWS, Azure, and GCP are recommending to secure break-glass accounts (from authentication, authorization, auditing, and secure access to cloud resources).

I recommend any organization that manages cloud production environments follow the vendors’ security best practices and keep the production environment secured.

About the Author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, and the author of the book Cloud Security Handbook, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. You can connect with him on Twitter.

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.

This post was originally published by the Cloud Security Alliance.

The use of the public cloud has become the new norm for any size organization.

Organizations are adopting cloud services, migrating systems to the cloud, consuming SaaS applications, and beginning to see the true benefits of the public cloud.

In this blog post, I will explain what it means to embrace a cloud-native mindset.

What is Cloud-Native?

When talking about cloud-native, there are two complimentary terms:

• Cloud-Native Infrastructure — Services that were specifically built to run on public cloud environments, such as containers, API gateways, managed databases, and more.
• Cloud-Native applications — Applications that take the full benefits of the public cloud, such as auto-scaling (up or down), microservice architectures, function as a service, and more.

Cloud First vs. Cloud-Native

For many years, there was a misconception among organizations and decision-makers, should we embrace a “cloud first” mindset, meaning, any new application we develop or consume must reside in the public cloud?

Cloud-first mindset is no longer relevant.

Cloud, like any other IT system, is meant to support the business, not to dictate business decisions.

One of the main reasons for any organization to create a cloud strategy is to allow decision-makers to align IT capabilities or services to business requirements.

There might be legacy systems generating value for the organization, and the cost to re-architect and migrate to the cloud is higher than the benefit of migration — in this case, the business should decide how to manage this risk.

When considering developing a new application or migrating an existing application to the cloud, consider the benefits of cloud-native (see below), and in any case, choosing the cloud makes sense (in terms of alignment to business goals, costs, performance, etc.), make it your first choice.

What are the benefits of Cloud-Native?

Since we previously mentioned cloud-native, let us review some of the main benefits of cloud-native:

Automation

One of the pre-requirements of cloud-native applications is the ability to deploy an entire workload in an automated manner using Infrastructure as Code.

In cloud environments, IaC comes naturally, but do not wait until your workloads are migrated or developed in the cloud — begin automating on-premise infrastructure deployments using scripts today.

Scale

Cloud-native applications benefit from the infinite scale of the public cloud.

Modern applications will scale up or down according to customers’ demand.

Legacy environments may have the ability to add more virtual machines in case of high load, but in most cases, they fail to release unneeded compute resources when the load on the application goes down, increasing resource costs.

Microservice architecture

One of the main benefits of cloud-native applications is the ability to break down complex architecture into small components (i.e., microservices)

Microservices allows development teams to own, develop, and maintain small portions of an application, making upgrading to newer versions an easy task.

If you are building new applications today, start architecting your applications using a microservices architecture, regardless if you are developing on-premise or in the public cloud.

It is important to note that microservices architecture increases the overall complexity of an application, by having many small components, so plan carefully.

Managed services

One of the main benefits when designing applications (or migrating an existing application) in the cloud, is to gain the benefit of managed services.

By consuming managed services (such as managed databases, storage, API gateways, etc.), you shift the overall maintenance, security, and stability to the cloud provider, which allows you to consume a service, without having to deal with the underlying infrastructure maintenance.

Whenever possible, prefer to choose a serverless managed service, which completely removes your requirement to deal with infrastructure scale (you simply do not specify how much computing power is required to run a service at any given time).

CI/CD pipeline

Modern applications are developed using a CI/CD pipeline, which creates a fast development lifecycle.

Each development team shares its code using a code repository, able to execute its build process, which ends up with an artifact ready to be deployed in any environment (Dev, Test, or Prod).

Modern compute services

Cloud-native applications allow us to have optimum use of the hardware.

Compute services such as containers and function as a service, make better use of hardware resources, when compared to physical or even virtual machines.

Containers can run on any platform (from on-premise to cloud environments), and although it may take some time for developers and DevOps to learn how to use them, they can suit most workloads (including AI/ML), and be your first step in embracing cloud-native applications.

Function as a Service is a different story — they suit specific tasks, and in most cases bound to a specific cloud environment, but if used wisely, they offer great efficiency when compared to other types of compute services.

Summary

What does it mean to embrace a cloud-native mindset?

Measuring the benefits of cloud-native applications, consuming cloud-native services, looking into the future of IT services, and wisely adopting the public cloud.

Will the public cloud suit 100% of scenarios? No, but it has more benefits than keeping legacy systems inside traditional data centers.

Whether you are a developer, DevOps, architect, or cybersecurity expert, I invite you to read, take online courses, practice, and gain experience using cloud-native infrastructure and applications, and consider them the better alternatives for running modern applications.

About the Author

Eyal Estrin is a cloud and information security architect, and the author of the book Cloud Security Handbook, with more than 20 years in the IT industry. You can connect with him on Twitter.

Opinions are his own and not the views of his employer.

The past couple of years brought us tons of examples of using generative AI to improve many aspects of our lives.

We can see vendors, with strong community and developers’ support, introducing more and more services for almost any aspect of our lives.

The two most famous examples are ChatGPT (AI Chatbot) and Midjourney (Image generator).

Wikipedia provides us with the following definition for Generative AI:

“Generative artificial intelligence (also generative AI or GenAI) is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other media, using generative models. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that have similar characteristics.”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence

In this blog post, I will compare some of the alternatives for using Gen AI to assist developers in producing code.

What are AI Code Generators?

AI code generators are services using AI/ML engines, integrated as part of the developer’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and provide the developer suggestions for code, based on the programming language and the project’s context.

In most cases, AI code generators come as a plugin or an addon to the developer’s IDE.

Mature AI code generators support multiple programming languages, can be integrated with most popular IDEs, and can provide valuable code samples, by understanding both the context of the code and the cloud provider’s eco-system.

AI Code Generators Terminology

Below are a couple of terms to know when using AI code generators:

• Suggestions – The output of AI code generators is code samples
• Prompts – Collection of code and supporting contextual information
• User engagement data / Client-side telemetry – Events generated at the client IDE (error messages, latency, feature engagement, etc.)
• Code snippets – Lines of code created by the developer inside the IDE
• Code References – Code originated from open-source or externally trained data

AI Code Generators – Alternative Comparison

The table below provides a comparison between the alternatives the largest cloud providers offer their customers:

AI Code Generators – Security Aspects

AI Code Generators can provide a lot of benefits for the developers, but at the end of the day we need to recall that these are still cloud-based services, deployed in a multi-tenant environment, and as with the case of any AI/ML, the vendor is aiming at training their AI/ML engines to provide better answers.

Code may contain sensitive data – from static credentials (secrets, passwords, API keys), hard-coded IP addresses or DNS names (for accessing back-end or even internal services), or even intellectual property code (as part of the organization’s internal IP).

Before consuming AI code generators, it is recommended to thoroughly review the vendors’ documentation, understand what data (such as telemetry) is transferred from the developer’s IDE back to the cloud, and how data is protected at all layers.

The table below provides a comparison between the alternatives the largest cloud providers offer their customers from a security point of view:

Summary

In this blog post, we have reviewed alternatives of AI code generators, offered by AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Although there are many benefits from using those services, allowing developers fast coding capabilities, the work on those services is still a work in progress.

Customers should perform their risk analysis before using those services, and limit as much as possible the amount of data shared with the cloud providers (since they are all built on multi-tenant environments).

As with any code developed, it is recommended to embed security controls, such as Static application security testing (SAST) tools, and invest in security training for developers.

References

• What is Amazon Code Whisperer?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codewhisperer/latest/userguide/what-is-cwspr.html

• GitHub Copilot documentation

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot

• Duet AI in Google Cloud overview

https://cloud.google.com/duet-ai/docs/overview?hl=en

This post was originally published by the Cloud Security Alliance.

According to the Shared Responsibility Model, “The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure”.

As customers, this leaves us with very little control over services managed by remote service providers, as compared to the amount of control we have over IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), where we control the operating system and anything inside it (applications, configuration, etc.)

The fact that many modern applications are offered as a SaaS, has many benefits such as:

• (Almost) zero maintenance (we are still in charge of authorization)
• (Almost) zero requirements to deal with availability or performance issues (depending on business requirements and the maturity of the SaaS vendor)
• (Almost) zero requirement to deal with security and compliance (at the end of the day, we are still responsible for complying with laws and regulations and we still have obligations to our customers and employees, depending on the data classification we are about to store in the cloud)
• The minimum requirement to handle licensing (depending on the SaaS pricing offers)
• As customers, we can consume a service and focus on our business (instead of infrastructure and application maintenance)

While there are many benefits of switching from maintaining servers to consuming (SaaS) applications, there are many security challenges we need to be aware of and risks to control.

In this blog post, I will review some of the security challenges facing SaaS applications.

Identity and Access Management

We may not control the underlining infrastructure, but as customers, we are still in charge of configuring proper authentication and authorization for our customers (internal or external).

As customers, we would like to take advantage of our current identities and leverage a federation mechanism to allow our end-users to log in once and through SSO to be able to access the SaaS application, all using standard protocols such as SAML, OAuth, or OpenID Connect.

Once the authentication phase is done, we need to take care of access permissions, following the role description/requirement.

We must always follow the principle of least privilege.

We should never accept a SaaS application that does not support granular role-based access control.

While working with SaaS applications, we need to make sure we can audit who had access to our data and what actions have been done.

The final phase is to make sure access is granted by business needs – once an employee no longer needs access to a SaaS application, we must revoke the access immediately.

Data Protection

Once we are using SaaS applications, we need to understand we no longer have “physical” control over our data – whether it is employee’s data, customers’ data, intellectual property, or any other type of data.

Once data is stored and processed by an external party, there is always a chance for a data breach, that may lead to data leakage, data tampering, encryption by ransomware, and more.

If we are planning to store sensitive data (PII’s, financial, healthcare, etc.) in the cloud, we must understand how data is being protected.

We must make sure data is encrypted both in transit and at rest (including backups, logs, etc.) and at any given time, access to data by anyone (from our employees, SaaS vendor employees, or even third-party companies), must be authenticated, authorized, and audited.

Misconfiguration

 The most common vulnerability is misconfiguration.

The easiest way is for an employee with administrative privileges to make a configuration mistake and grant someone unnecessary access permissions, make data publicly available, forget to turn encryption at rest on (depending on specific SaaS applications), and more.

Some SaaS applications allow you to set configuration control using CASB (Cloud Access Security Brokers) or SSPM (SaaS Security Posture Management).

The problem is the lack of standardization in the SaaS industry.

There is no standard for allowing central configuration management using APIs.

If you are using common SaaS applications such as Office 365, Dropbox, SalesForce, or any other common SaaS application, you may be able to find many third-party security solutions that will allow you to mitigate misconfiguration.

Otherwise, if you are working with a small start-up vendor or with an immature SaaS vendor, your only options are a good legal contract (defining the obligations of the SaaS vendor), demand for certifications (such as SOC2 Type II reports) and accepting the risk (depending on the business risk tolerance).

Insecure API’s

Many SaaS applications allow you to connect using APIs (from audit logs to configuration management).

Regardless of the data classification, you must always make sure your SaaS vendor’s APIs support the following:

• All APIs require authentication and perform a back-end authorization process.
• All traffic to the API is encrypted in transit
• All-access to API is audited (for further analysis)
• If the SaaS application allows traffic initiation through API back to your organization, make sure you enforce input validation to avoid inserting malicious code into your internal systems

I recommend you never rely on third-party SaaS vendors – always coordinate penetration testing on exposed APIs to mitigate the risk of insecure APIs.

Third-Party Access

Some SaaS vendors allow (or rely on) third-party vendor access.

When conducting due diligence with SaaS vendors, make sure to check if it allows any third-party vendor access to customers’ data and how is data protected.

Also, make sure the contract specifies if data is transferred to third-party vendors, who are they and for which purpose.

Make sure everything is written in the contract with the SaaS vendor and that the SaaS vendor must notify you of any change regarding data access or transfer to third-party vendors.

Patch Management and System Vulnerabilities

Since we are only consumers of a managed service, we have no control or visibility to infrastructure or application layers.

Everything is made of software and software is vulnerable by design.

We may be able to coordinate vulnerability scanning or even short-term penetration testing with the SaaS vendor (depending on the SaaS vendor maturity), but we are still dependent on the transparency of the SaaS vendor and this is a risk we need to accept (depending on the business risk tolerance).

Lack of SaaS Vendor Transparency

This is very important.

Mature SaaS vendors will make sure we are up to date with information such as breach notifications, outages, and scheduled maintenance (at least when everybody on the Internet talks about critical software vulnerabilities requiring immediate patching, and assuming downtime is required).

As part of vendor transparency, I would expect the legal contract to force the SaaS vendor to keep us up to date with data breach incidents or potential unauthorized access to customers’ data.

Since in most cases, we do not have a real way to audit SaaS vendors’ security controls, I recommend working only with mature vendors who can provide proof of their maturity level (such as SOC 2 Type II reports every year) and coordinate your assessments on the SaaS vendor.

Mature SaaS vendors will allow us access to audit logs, to query who has access to our data and what actions have been done with the data.

Regulatory Compliance

Regardless of the cloud service model, we are always responsible for our data and we must always comply with laws and regulations, wherever our customers reside or wherever our SaaS vendor stores our data.

Mature SaaS vendors allow us to comply with data residency and make sure data does not leave a specific country or region.

Compliance goes for the entire lifecycle of our data – from upload/store, process, data backup or retention, to finally data destruction.

Make sure the legal contract specifies data residency and the vendor’s obligations regarding compliance.

From a customer’s point of view, make sure you get legal advice on how to comply with all relevant laws and regulations.

Summary

In this blog post, I have reviewed some of the most common security challenges working with SaaS applications.

SaaS applications have many benefits (from a customer point of view), but they also contain security risks that we need to be aware of and manage regularly.

In 2020, the world has suddenly stopped due to the pandemic.

A couple of years later, we began to see changes in the way both home consumers and organizations are using technology.

Common areas that have changed in the post-covid era

Here are a couple of areas that adapted in the post-covid era:

Customer support

Traditional engagement methods (such as phone calls, Fax, or even emails) have decreased in the past couple of years.

Today, customers are looking for fast and mobile methods to connect to contact centers from anywhere – from using mobile apps to connecting via chat (in some cases even a chatbot is a viable solution).

The use of mobile apps

Customers are using mobile apps for more than a decade – from social networks (for personal interaction), e-commerce (for purchasing products), banking (checking account status, money transfer, etc.), travel (for ordering flight tickets or hotels), and more.

The use of mobile apps is not something new, but in the past couple of years, we see customers using mobile for almost every step of their daily life.

The use of the public cloud

The public cloud has been in use for almost two decades, but during the Covid, more and more organizations began to see the benefits of the cloud and began migrating systems to the cloud.

It is true, that there are still organizations choosing to invest in maintaining data centers for running their applications, but as time goes by, more and more organizations are embracing the public cloud.

The fact that we pay for the resources we consume, and the (almost) infinite compute capacity, made the cloud very attractive to most organizations around the world – from large corporations to newly founded start-ups.

Hybrid work and work-life balance

In the post-covid era, more and more organizations are offering their employees the option of choosing whether to work from the office or from anywhere else, as long as the employee gets their work done.

Employers understand the importance of work-life balance and began to respect employee’s personal life, which decrease the levels of stress and creates satisfied and productive employees.

The use of AI

For many years, researchers have tried to teach computers how to support people in decision-making.

In the past couple of years, we see AI/ML solutions for almost any area in human lives.

From advising on which music should listen to (based on their past listening history), aiding doctors in providing better medical care to patients (based on their health status and technological improvements), using AI to quickly calculate customers’ credit scores and be able to offer customers with relevant investment plans, and more.

How can organizations prepare for the digital transformation?

There are various areas where organizations should adapt and better prepare themselves for the digital transformation:

Customer-centric

Organizations should change their mindset and put their customers first.

Conduct customer surveys and research what can provide your customers the most value, from better customer service to an easy-to-navigate mobile app or anything that will keep your customers satisfied.

Be transparent with your customers, for example – if your organization is collecting personal data from customers, provide them with information about the data you are collecting, the purpose and what are you planning to do with the data, and allow your customers to choose whether to provide you their data.

Keep your employees engaged

Explain to your employees about the coming changes, allow them to provide their feedback, and be part of the process.

As technology evolves, employees would like to re-invent themselves or even choose a different career path.

An organization should support its employees and find ways to allow employees to expand their knowledge or even switch to a different role within the organization.

Conduct training, allowing employees to expand their knowledge (from new ways to interact with customers, new technologies, new or modern development languages, and more).

Allow your employees the ability to combine work from the office with remote work from home, to support employees’ work-life balance.

Embrace the public cloud

No matter how professional your employees are, most of the chance your organization will never have the expertise of the public cloud providers, the scale, or the elasticity that the public cloud allows your organization and customers to get.

Develop a cloud strategy that clearly defines what workloads or data can be migrated to the cloud and begin to modernize your applications.

Modernize your applications

Your organization may have many applications, already serving you and your customers.

Now is the time to ask yourself, what applications are still providing you value and what applications can be modernized or re-architect and provide better usability, higher availability, and elasticity with lower cost.

Consider embracing cloud-native applications and gain the full benefit of the public cloud.

Summary

Digital transformation is disrupting the way home consumers and organizations are using technology to make everyday life better.

Every day we find new ways to consume information, purchase products, get better healthcare or financial services, or even better ways to conduct business and interact with our customers.

To embrace digital transformation, we need to adapt to the change.

If you have not done so yet, now is the time to jump on the digital transformation train.

IAM (Identity and Access Management) is a crucial part of any cloud environment.

As organizations evolve, they may look at multi-cloud as a solution to consume cloud services in different cloud providers’ technologies (such as AI/ML, data analytics, and more), to have the benefit of using different pricing models, or to decrease the risk of vendor lock-in.

Before we begin the discussion about IAM, we need to understand the following fundamental concepts:

• Identity – An account represents a persona (human) or service (non-interactive account)
• Authentication – The act where an identity proves himself against a system (such as providing username and password, certificate, API key, and more)
• Authorization – The act of validating granting an identity’s privileges to take actions on a system (such as view configuration, read database content, upload a file to object storage, and more)
• Access Management – The entire lifecycle of IAM – from account provisioning, granting access, and validating privileges until account or privilege revocation.

Identity and Access Management Terminology

Authorization in the Cloud

Although all cloud providers have the same concept of identities, when we deep dive into the concept of authorization or access management to resources/services, we need to understand the differences between cloud providers.

Authorization in AWS

AWS has two concepts for managing permissions to resources:

• IAM Role – Permissions assigned to an identity temporarily.
• IAM Policy – A document defines a set of permissions assigned to an IAM role.

Permissions in AWS can be assigned to:

• Identity – A policy attached to a user, group, or role.
• Resource – A policy attached to a resource (such as Amazon S3 bucket).

Authorization in Azure

Permissions in Azure AD are controlled by roles.

A role defines the permissions an identity has over an Azure resource.

Within Azure AD, you control permissions using RBAC (Role-based access control).

Azure AD supports the following types of roles:

• Built-in roles – A pre-defined role according to job function (as you can read on the link).
• Custom roles – A role that we create ourselves to match the principle of least privilege.

Authorization in Google Cloud

Permissions in Google Cloud IAM are controlled by IAM roles.

Google Cloud IAM supports the following types of IAM roles:

• Basic roles – The most permissive type of roles (Owner, Editor, and Viewer).
• Predefined roles – Roles managed by Google, which provides granular access to specific services (as you can read on the link).
• Custom roles – User-specific roles, which provide the most granular access to resources.

Authorization – Default behavior

As we can see below each cloud provider takes a different approach to default permissions:

• AWS – By default, new IAM users have no permission to access any resource in AWS.
  To allow access to resources or take actions, you need to manually assign the user an IAM role.
• Azure – By default, all Azure AD users are granted a set of default permissions (such as listing all users, reading all properties of users and groups, registering new applications, and more).
• Google Cloud – By default, a new service account is granted the Editor role on the project level.

Identity Federation

When we are talking about identity federation, there are two concepts:

• Service Provider (SP) – Provide access to resources
• Identity Provider (IdP) – Authenticate the identities

Identities (user accounts, service accounts, groups, etc.) are managed by an Identity Provider (IdP).

An IdP can exist in the local data center (such as Microsoft Active Directory) or the public cloud (such as AWS IAM, Azure AD, Google Cloud IAM, etc.)

Federation is the act of creating trust between separate IdP’s.

Federation allows us to keep identity in one repository (i.e., Identity Provider).

Once we set up an identity federation, we can grant an identity privilege to consume resources in a remote repository.

Example: a worker with an account in Microsoft Active Directory, reading a file from object storage in Azure, once a federation trust was established between Microsoft Active Directory and Azure Active Directory.

When federating between the on-premise and cloud environments, we need to recall the use of different protocols.

On-premise environments are using legacy authentication protocols such as Kerberos or LDAP.

In the public cloud, the common authentication protocols are SAML 2.0, Open ID Connect (OIDC), and OAuth 2.0

Each cloud provider has a list of supported external third-party identity providers to federate with, as you can read in the list below:

• Integrating third-party SAML solution providers with AWS
• Azure AD Identity Provider Compatibility Docs
• Google Cloud IAM – Configure workforce identity federation

Single Sign-On

The concept behind SSO is to allow identities (usually end-users) access to resources in the cloud while having to sign (to an identity provider) once.

Over the past couple of years, the concept of SSO was extended and now it is possible to allow a single identity (who authenticated to a specific identity provider), access to resources over federated login to an external (mostly SAML) identity provider.

Each cloud provider has its own SSO service, supporting federation with external identity providers:

• AWS IAM Identity Center
• Azure Active Directory single sign-on
• Google Cloud Workload identity federation

Steps for creating a federation between cloud providers

The process below explains (at a high level) the steps require to set up identity federation between different cloud providers:

1. Choose an IdP (where identities will be created and authenticated to).
2. Create a SAML identity provider.
3. Configure roles for your third-party identity provider.
4. Assign roles to the target users.
5. Create trust between SP and IdP.
6. Test the ability to authenticate and identify (user) to a resource in a remote/external cloud provider.

Additional References:

• AWS IAM Identity Center and Azure AD as IdP
• How to set up IAM federation using Google Workspace
• Azure AD SSO integration with AWS IAM Identity Center
• Azure AD SSO integration with Google Cloud / G Suite Connector by Microsoft
• Federating Google Cloud with Azure Active Directory
• Configure Google workload identity federation with AWS or Azure

Summary

In this blog post, we had a deep dive into identity and access management in the cloud, comparing different aspects of IAM in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

After we have reviewed how authentication and authorization work for each of the three cloud providers, we have explained how federation and SSO work in a multi-cloud environment.

Important to keep in mind:

When we are building systems in the cloud, whether they are publicly exposed or even internal, we need to follow some basic rules:

• All-access to resources/systems/applications must be authenticated
• Permissions must follow the principle of least privileged and business requirements
• All access must be audited (for future analysis, investigation purposes, etc.)

This post was originally published by the Cloud Security Alliance.

When we are talking about building new systems, in the context of privacy or data protection, we often hear two concepts – Privacy by Design (PbD) and Privacy by Default.

Dealing with human privacy is not something new.

We build applications that store and process personal data – from e-commerce sites, banking, healthcare, advertisement, and more.

The concept of Privacy by Design (PbD) was embraced by the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Article 5 and Article 25, the CCPA (California Consumer Protection Act) in W410-1, the LGPD (Brazilian Data Protection Law) in Article 46 and the Canadian PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) in Recommendation 14.

When designing systems in the cloud, we must remember the Shared Responsibility Model.

The cloud provider is responsible for the underlining infrastructure layers and offers us many built-in security controls, but it is our responsibility as companies developing systems in the cloud, to use the security controls and design applications to meet all privacy requirements.

In this blog post, I will provide insights about how to implement those concepts when building new systems in the cloud.

What is Privacy by Design?

Privacy by Design (PbD) is based on seven “foundational principles”:

Principle 1: Proactive not reactive; preventive not remedial

To achieve this principle, we need to implement proactive security controls.

Examples of security controls that come built-in as part of major cloud providers:

• Identity and Access Management – Enforce authentication (who the persona claims to be) and authorization (what actions can be done by authenticated identity).

Examples of services: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM).

• Network Protection – Enforce inbound/outbound access to services using access control mechanisms.

Examples of services: AWS Security groups, Azure Network security groups (NSG), GCP VPC firewall rules, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Security Lists.

• Data Encryption – Enforce confidentiality by encrypting data in transit and at rest.

Examples of services: AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud KMS, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vault.

Principle 2: Privacy as the default setting

To achieve this principle, we need to implement default settings at the application level and on the infrastructure level.

• Data minimization – When designing an application, we need to decide what is the minimum number of fields that will be stored (and perhaps processed) on data subjects in the application.
• Data location – When designing an application, we need to take into consideration data residency, by selecting the target region to store data according to relevant laws and regulations.
• Data retention – We need to set our application to keep data for as long as it is required and either delete or archive data when it is no longer needed (according to application/service capabilities).

Examples: Amazon S3 lifecycle management, Amazon EFS lifecycle management, Azure Storage lifecycle management, Google Cloud Storage Lifecycle Management, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage Lifecycle Management.

• Keeping Audit Trail – By default administrative actions (usually using APIs) are logged by all major cloud providers. If we want to increase log retention or include data actions (what identity did with the data), we need to manually enable it.

Examples of services: AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Audit Logs, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging service.

• Data Encryption – Enforce confidentiality by encrypting data in transit and at rest.

Principle 3: Privacy Embedded into Design

To achieve this principle, we need to embed privacy safeguards as part of the design.

Most data protection or data privacy regulations offers the data subjects the following rights:

• The right to be informed about the collection and use of their data.
• The right to view and request copies of their data.
• The right to request inaccurate or outdated personal information be updated or corrected.
• The right to request their data be deleted.
• The right to ask for their data to be transferred to another controller or provided to them.

When we design an application, we need to develop it to support the above data subject rights from day one, so once we need to use those functionalities, we will have them prepared, even before collecting information about the first data subject.

Principle 4: Full functionality – positive-sum, not zero-sum

To achieve this principle, we need to look at the bigger picture.

Privacy safeguards should be embedded as part of the application design, without affecting security controls or without causing performance impact on other services.

An example can be the security requirement to audit all actions in the system (for the incident response process) while keeping data privacy requirement to keep only a minimum amount of information about data subjects, not to mention the cost of keeping long-term audit log storage.

In the case of audit logs, we need to find the balance between having logs for investigation, while removing unnecessary information about data subjects, and perhaps moving old logs to an archive tier to save costs.

Principle 5: End-to-end security – full lifecycle protection

To achieve this principle, we need to make sure data is kept private throughout its entire lifecycle, from collection, storage, retirement, and disposal (when not required anymore).

When talking about data security, we must always remember to follow the CIA triad: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

The data lifecycle management contains the following:

• Data generation of the collection – We need to take into consideration automatic data classification.
• Storage – We need to take into consideration data retention and archiving, including storage capacity and archiving capabilities.
• Data use and sharing – We need to implement strong authentication and authorization processes to protect the data we store and process.
• Data archive – We should take advantage of built-in storage archive capabilities that exist with all major cloud providers.
• Data disposal – We should design mechanisms to allow us to destroy data no longer needed.

Principle 6: Visibility and transparency – keep it open

To achieve this principle, we need to create and publish a privacy policy, that will be available for our customers, per application or per website we publicly expose to the Internet.

The privacy policy should contain information about:

• The data we collect.
• The purpose for collecting data from our customers.
• If we share private data with third parties, the privacy policy should indicate it.
• The data subject rights (such as viewing which data is been collected, the right to update data subjects’ data or delete data subject data).
• How can data subjects contact us (to view data, update it, delete it, or export it)?

Visibility and transparency are crucial, and as such, the privacy policy must be kept up to date.

Principle 7: Respect for user privacy – keep it user-centric

To achieve this principle, we need to put our customers (or data subjects) first.

User experience is an important factor – how will our customers know that we are collecting private data? How will they be able to consent to data collection, view the data we are collecting, or ask us to delete it?

We need to configure our application with privacy settings enabled by default and allow our customers an easy way to opt-in (subscribe) or opt out (unsubscribe) from our service.

We need to design our system to allow customers an easy way to export their private data and support the portability of the data we collect to another third-party system in a standard readable format.

Summary

When designing applications that will store or process private data in the cloud, we should remember the shared responsibility model, together with the seven principles of privacy by design.

Some of the principles can be achieved using services offered by cloud providers, for some, we can use third-party solutions and for some we are responsible for the implementation, to comply with privacy laws or regulations and to keep our customers’ private data safe.

For any organization designing new applications in the cloud, I recommend creating teams containing representatives of both the technology department (such as DevOps, architects, and security personnel) and legal department (such as Lawyers, data privacy, compliance, and risk), to be able to design an end-to-end solution.

I invite anyone designing new applications, to read and get more information about the privacy law and regulations affecting their customers.

Disclaimer – This blog post contains my opinion. It does not replace any legal advice for complying with privacy obligations or regulations.

When deploying a new application in the public cloud, we need to ask the business owner what are the resiliency (or SLA) requirements – How long can the business survive while our application is down and does not serve customers?

There are various answers to that question – from 24/7 availability (not realistic) to uptime of 99.9%, etc.

The domain of resiliency has two main concepts:

• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) – the amount of time it takes to recover a system after disruption
• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) – the amount of data loss, measured by time

To achieve high resiliency, or follow business SLA requirements, there are technical and cost consequences.

Naturally, we want to provision resources in high-availability (such as a farm of front-end web servers behind load-balancer), in a cluster (such as a cluster of database instances), deployed in multiple availability zones or perhaps in multiple regions, and try to avoid single point of failure.

We need to plan an architecture that will support our business resiliency requirements.

In theory, an architect can look at proposed architecture and say whether or not he sees potential availability failures, but it does not scale in large and complex architectures.

In 2021, AWS announced the general availability of the AWS Resilience Hub.

In this blog post, I will review what is the purpose of this service and how can we use it regularly, as part of our CI/CD process.

How does AWS Resilience Hub work?

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/resilience-hub/latest/userguide/how-it-works.html

To work with AWS Resilience Hub, follow the steps below:

Add an application

AWS Resilience Hub allows you to assess an application by scanning the following resources:

• AWS Resource Groups
• AWS AppRegistry applications
• AWS CloudFormation stacks
• Terraform state files
• Amazon EKS cluster configuration

Set resilience targets

AWS Resilience Hub supports the following built-in tiers:

• Foundational IT core services
• Mission critical
• Critical
• Important
• Non-critical

Choose the target policy according to the application business requirements of RTO and RPO.

Select one of the predefined suggested policies:

• Non-critical application
• Important Application
• Critical Application
• Global Critical Application
• Mission Critical Application
• Global Mission Critical Application
• Foundational Core Service

AWS Resilience Hub allows you to evaluate the resiliency of an application against the following types of disruption:

• Customer Application RTO and RPO
• AWS Infrastructure RTO and RPO
• Cloud Infrastructure Availability Zone (AZ) disruption
• AWS Region disruption

Run an assessment

AWS Resilience Hub allows you to either run manual on-time assessments or schedule an assessment daily.

To get the most value from AWS Resilience Hub, you can integrate it as part of a CI/CD pipeline, as an additional step, once you provision Infrastructure as Code (using CloudFormation templates or Terraform modules).

A common example of integration with CI/CD pipeline:

• AWS CodePipeline
• Jenkins Pipelines
• GitHub Actions

In a mature environment, you can take one step further and integrate AWS Resilience Hub with the built-in chaos engineering service AWS Fault Injection Simulator to conduct controlled experiments on your application and evaluate its resiliency.

Review results and continue improvements

Once an assessment was completed, it is time to review the results, to make sure your application meets the business resiliency requirements (in terms of RTO/RPO).

The results will be written in a report, with recommendations for improvements to your application resiliency, such as adding another node to an RDS cluster, deploying another EC2 instance in another availability zone, enabling S3 bucket versioning, etc.

To make things easy to understand and improve over time, you can build dashboards using Amazon QuickSight and send alerts using CloudWatch, as explained in the blog post:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/resilience-reporting-dashboard-aws-resilience-hub/

For continuous and automated improvement, you can integrate AWS Resilience Hub with AWS Systems Manager to efficiently recover your application in the event of outages, as explained in the blog post:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/resilience-hub/latest/userguide/create-custom-ssm-doc.html

Summary

In this blog post, we learned about the purpose of AWS Resilience Hub, what are the various steps for using it, and perhaps most important – how to automate the assessment as part of a CI/CD pipeline for continuous improvement.

I encourage anyone who builds applications on top of AWS to learn about the benefits of this service, providing insights into the resiliency of applications to meet business requirements.

Additional References:

• Validating and Improving the RTO and RPO Using AWS Resilience Hub
• Establishing RPO and RTO Targets for Cloud Applications
• How to use the AWS Resilience Hub score
• Prepare & Protect Your Applications from Disruption with AWS Resilience Hub

In the past couple of years, we hear the term “Chaos Engineering” in the context of cloud.

Mature organizations have already begun to embrace the concepts of chaos engineering, and perhaps the most famous use of chaos engineering began at Netflix when they developed Chaos Monkey.

To quote Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO: “Everything fails, all the time”.

What is chaos engineering and what are the benefits of using chaos engineering for increasing the resiliency and reliability of workloads in the public cloud?

What is Chaos Engineering?

“Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.” (Source: https://principlesofchaos.org)

Production workloads on large scale, are built from multiple services, creating distributed systems.

When we design large-scale workloads, we think about things such as:

• Creating high-available systems
• Creating disaster recovery plans
• Decreasing single point of failure
• Having the ability to scale up and down quickly according to the load on our application

One thing we usually do not stop to think about is the connectivity between various components of our application and what will happen in case of failure in one of the components of our application.

What will happen if, for example, a web server tries to access a backend database, and it will not be able to do so, due to network latency on the way to the backend database?

How will this affect our application and our customers?

What if we could test such scenarios on a live production environment, regularly?

Do we trust our application or workloads infrastructure so much, that we are willing to randomly take down parts of our infrastructure, just so we will know the effect on our application?

How will this affect the reliability of our application, and how will it allow us to build better applications?

History of Chaos Engineering

In 2010 Netflix developed a tool called “Chaos Monkey“, whose goal was to randomly take down compute services (such as virtual machines or containers), part of the Netflix production environment, and test the impact on the overall Netflix service experience.

In 2011 Netflix released a toolset called “The Simian Army“, which added more capabilities to the Chaos Monkey, from reliability, security, and resiliency (i.e., Chaos Kong which simulates an entire AWS region going down).

In 2012, Chaos Monkey became an open-source project (under Apache 2.0 license).

In 2016, a company called Gremlin released the first “Failure-as-a-Service” platform.

In 2017, the LitmusChaos project was announced, which provides chaos jobs in Kubernetes.

In 2019, Alibaba Cloud announced ChaosBlade, an open-source Chaos Engineering tool.

In 2020, Chaos Mesh 1.0 was announced as generally available, an open-source cloud-native chaos engineering platform.

In 2021, AWS announced the general availability of AWS Fault Injection Simulator, a fully managed service to run controlled experiments.

In 2021, Azure announced the public preview of Azure Chaos Studio.

What exactly is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos Engineering is about experimentation based on real-world hypotheses.

Think about Chaos Engineering, as one of the tests you run as part of a CI/CD pipeline, but instead of a unit test or user acceptance test, you inject controlled faults into the system to measure its resiliency.

Chaos Engineering can be used for both modern cloud-native applications (built on top of Kubernetes) and for the legacy monolith, to achieve the same result – answering the question – will my system or application survive a failure?

On high-level, Chaos Engineering is made of the following steps:

• Create a hypothesis
• Run an experiment
• Analyze the results
• Improve system resiliency

As an example, here is AWS’s point of view regarding the shared responsibility model, in the context of resiliency:

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/chaos-engineering-in-the-cloud

Chaos Engineering managed platform comparison

In the table below we can see a comparison between AWS and Azure-managed services for running Chaos Engineering experiments:

Additional References:

• AWS FIS actions reference
• Azure Chaos Studio fault and action library

Summary

In this post, I have explained the concept of Chaos Engineering and compared alternatives to cloud-managed services.

Using Chaos Engineering as part of a regular development process will allow you to increase the resiliency of your applications, by studying the effect of failures and designing recovery processes.

Chaos Engineering can also be used as part of a disaster recovery and business continuity process, by testing the resiliency of your systems.

Additional References

• Chaos engineering (Wikipedia)
• Principles of Chaos Engineering
• Chaos Engineering in the Cloud
• What Chaos Engineering Is (and is not)
• AWS re:Invent 2022 – The evolution of chaos engineering at Netflix (NFX303)
• What is AWS Fault Injection Simulator?
• What is Azure Chaos Studio?
• Public Chaos Engineering Stories / Implementations