Stack Overflow’s 2021 Developer Survey found that 54% of developers use AWS, yet only 7% use Terraform.

In simpler times, IT operations had the responsibility to configure and deploy new infrastructure, mostly via command line interface (CLI) and scripts. Today, even those with the most advanced command line prowess cannot keep up with the scalability and agility demands of companies building and deploying infrastructure in the cloud.

Speed is the name of the game for developers. That’s why security isn’t always a top priority for them—it’s seen as a slowdown or blocker for developers whose performance depends on their velocity.

Kubernetes is a powerful tool with enough settings to deploy a performant, scalable, and reliable cloud native application. There are also enough settings so that it’s hard to keep all security and compliance best practices straight.

Since the term was first coined in 2017, GitOps has provided a new operating model for developing, delivering, testing, and deploying cloud-native infrastructure.

No, this isn’t another post about the Secure Development Lifecycle. This is a practical post on why and how to address cloud security at each step of the infrastructure development lifecycle, from infrastructure as code in your IDE to running cloud resources.

Helm charts are an easy way to package, version and deploy applications on Kubernetes. They can be used to deploy application services or even Kubernetes components and tools.

Cloud configurations change. All the time. It’s futile to imagine web app development without a constant stream of configuration changes in order to adopt new technologies, release new features, and support new business requirements.

Deploying and managing cloud resources is faster and easier than ever, and we have infrastructure as code (IaC) to thank for it. With IaC, tedious manual configurations and one-off scripts are things of the past. Instead, you manage infrastructure with code in much the same way you would applications and services. This infrastructure can be anything from servers and databases to networks, Kubernetes clusters, and entire application stacks.