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Let’s Discuss DevOps vs. DevSecOps – Differences and Use Cases
Suppose you’re building a healthcare system. Your team has struggled to keep up with the increasing demand for your services and the traditional approach to software development.
Slow deployment times, code errors, and security vulnerabilities are challenges you’re facing regularly. These issues not only impact your team’s ability to deliver quality software on time but also put the healthcare system’s data at risk.
You and your team realize that you need to make a change. After doing some research, you come across the concept of DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development approach that prioritizes collaboration and effective communication between development and operations teams, with the goal of delivering software faster and more reliably.
DevOps practices and tools include automation, continuous integration/delivery (CI/CD), version control, monitoring and logging, and infrastructure as code. These practices and tools enable teams to automate manual tasks, reduce errors, and improve the speed and quality of software delivery.
This is what your team needs to overcome the challenges they faced with the traditional approach.
You begin implementing DevOps practices and tools, breaking down the silos between Dev and Ops. You start automating the deployment process, using tools like Puppet and Chef to manage infrastructure as code. You also implement continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), allowing you to deliver code changes to production faster and more confidently.
However, as you continue down the DevOps path, you realize that security is becoming an increasingly important concern. With increased cyber attacks, you must ensure the healthcare system’s data and infrastructure are secure.
DevOps Approaches
DevOps practices are a set of methodologies, techniques, and tools that enable teams to deliver software quickly, reliably, and at scale. These practices typically include:
🔸 Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous integration is a software development practice that automates the process of integrating code changes into a central repository. By frequently merging changes and running tests, developers can quickly identify and address bugs, improve software quality, and shorten the time it takes to release updates.
In other words, continuous integration helps DevOps teams streamline their development processes and ensure their software is always up-to-date, reliable, and easy to deploy.
🔸 Continuous Delivery (CD)
Continuous delivery builds upon CI by automating the process of deploying code changes to a testing or production environment. It involves creating a continuous delivery pipeline that combines automated builds, tests, and deployments into a single-release workflow.
By doing so, DevOps teams can ensure that their software is consistently tested and released with minimal manual intervention, reducing the risk of errors and improving the speed of software delivery. In essence, continuous delivery takes the benefits of continuous integration to the next level, enabling teams to deliver software updates to their customers faster and more reliably.
🔸 Automation
Automation is a critical DevOps practice that allows teams to accelerate the development and deployment of high-quality software. By automating key processes, such as builds, tests, and deployments, DevOps teams can move much more quickly through the software development lifecycle.
For instance, pushing code changes to a source code repository can trigger an automated process that builds, tests, and deploys the code changes, significantly reducing the time needed to complete these steps. As a result, teams can deliver software updates to their customers faster and more reliably while reducing the risk of errors and improving overall productivity.
🔸 Infrastructure as Code
Whether an organization uses an on-premise data center or is fully cloud-based, the ability to rapidly and consistently provision, configure, and manage infrastructure is essential for effective DevOps adoption.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a practice that goes beyond just scripting infrastructure configuration to treat infrastructure definitions as actual code, complete with source control, code reviews, and tests.
By adopting IaC, DevOps teams can manage infrastructure in a more scalable and repeatable manner, enabling them to deploy and update infrastructure configurations faster and more efficiently.
🔸 Microservices
Microservices is a software architectural approach that involves breaking down an application into a collection of smaller, independent services (aka, microservices) that can be deployed and operated separately from each other.
Each service functions independently, with its own processes, and communicates with other services through an interface. This decoupling of functionality and separation of concerns enables DevOps practices such as continuous integration and delivery, as each service can be tested and deployed independently.
By leveraging microservices, DevOps teams can build and deploy applications more quickly, with each service functioning as a self-contained module that can be easily updated or replaced as needed.
🔸 Monitoring
DevOps teams monitor the entire software development lifecycle, from initial planning and development to integration, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations. By doing so, they can quickly detect any issues that may impact the customer experience and respond to them in an automated and timely manner.
Additionally, this approach enables teams to “shift left in the DevOps pipeline by catching and resolving issues earlier in the development process, reducing the likelihood of broken changes in production.
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps that emphasizes integrating security into every stage of the software development lifecycle. It involves collaborating with development, operations, and security teams to ensure that software is delivered securely and compliantly.
The objective of DevSecOps is to empower developers to detect and address security concerns in the early stages of the development cycle, thereby mitigating the chances of security breaches and non-adherence to compliance regulations.
DevSecOps also emphasizes the need for security to be everyone’s responsibility, not just the security team’s. By involving developers and operations teams in security practices, DevSecOps aims to create a culture of security across the organization.
Continuing the healthcare system development story…
With DevSecOps, you can identify and address security vulnerabilities early in the development process.
You implement DevSecOps practices and tools, such as static code analysis, container security, and dynamic application security testing (DAST). You also implement security testing as part of the CI/CD pipeline, enabling you to catch security issues early in the development process.
This way, your team has transformed from a traditional software development and operations team to a high-performing DevSecOps team.
Read More: How to Implement DevSecOps to Secure Your CI/CD Pipeline?
5 Difference Between DevOps and DevSecOps
If you talk at the surface level, DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps, and there aren’t any significant differences between both. However, below the surface, there are several differences in mindset, skill requirements, security, etc.
Let’s know them.
1. Focus
The primary focus of DevOps is on facilitating seamless collaboration between the Dev and Ops teams to enable continuous delivery of software. In contrast, DevSecOps puts a greater emphasis on security, ensuring that security is integrated into every stage of the software development lifecycle.
2. Security
While DevOps also includes security considerations, DevSecOps prioritizes security from the outset, making it an integral part of the development and operations processes. This means that application security is not an afterthought or bolted on at the end of the process but is built into the software from the beginning.
3. Skillset
DevOps teams typically consist of developers and operations professionals, focusing on software delivery and infrastructure management. In contrast, DevSecOps teams also include security professionals specializing in security testing, vulnerability management, and compliance monitoring.
4. Tooling
DevOps and DevSecOps use similar tooling for automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and version control. However, DevSecOps also includes specialized tools for security testing, vulnerability scanning, and compliance monitoring.
5. Culture
DevOps focuses on fostering a culture of collaboration, whereas DevSecOps aims to create a security culture across the organization. This means everyone is responsible for security, not just the security team.
DevSecOps Approaches
As DevSecOps is aimed at bringing the security element to every phase of the DevOps pipeline, the practices include:
The planning phase of DevSecOps is characterized by collaboration, discussion, review, and strategizing of security analysis. In this phase, teams must conduct a security analysis and develop a plan that specifies the locations, methods, and timeframes for security testing.
IriusRisk is a widely used planning tool for DevSecOps, which is a collaborative design tool for threat modeling. Other tools, such as Jira Software, an issue tracking and management tool, and Slack, a communication and chat tool, are also commonly utilized in this phase.
The build phase in DevSecOps begins when developers push their code to the source repository. Here, the focus is on automated security analysis against the build output artifact.
This phase is critical because developers often rely on third-party code dependencies, which may be from unknown or untrusted sources. These external dependencies could accidentally or intentionally include vulnerabilities and exploits. Therefore, it is crucial to review and scan these dependencies for any security risks during the build phase.
Key security practices in the build phase include software component analysis, unit tests, and static application software testing (SAST). These tests can be automated by integrating security tools into an existing CI/CD pipeline.
After creating and deploying a build artifact to a staging or testing environment, the test phase is initiated. This phase is time-consuming due to the comprehensive test suite that needs to be executed. Therefore, it is important to identify failures early so that more expensive tests can be performed towards the end.
During the test phase, DAST tools are used to detect live application flows, such as user authentication, authorization, SQL injection, and API-related endpoints. DAST tools are focused on security and analyze the application against a list of known high-severity issues.
In the deployment phase, DevSecOps promotes using automated deployment processes to minimize the possibility of human error. The tools used in this phase concentrate on the deployment pipeline to guarantee the release of secure and compliant software.
Security testing tools continuously scan the infrastructure and the network for signs of vulnerabilities or compromise. Containerization and orchestration tools are widely adopted to standardize and streamline the deployment process.
After deploying an application in a live production environment, continuous security measures are necessary to monitor and detect potential security threats.
In this phase, technologies like Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) can identify and block incoming threats automatically, while penetration testing and bug bounty programs can find and address vulnerabilities. In addition, DevSecOps teams also use security monitoring tools to track critical security-related metrics and flag requests to sensitive endpoints.
