DevOps Vs. DevSecOps

Introduction:

In the past few years, the IT industry has gone through tremendous changes due to innovations and advancements in technology. DevOps is one such key player in this transformation that has removed siloed roles and processes, establishing closer collaboration between developers and system administrators in the software development process, promoting automation and continuous delivery, among other beneficial practices.

However, the ever-increasing demand for quality and secure applications propelled further development in DevOps, which resulted in the introduction of DevSecOps.

But what makes DevSecOps different from DevOps?

To answer this question, we are here with a detailed comparison of DevOps and DevSecOps.

DevOps

A technology that led to drastic changes in the software development landscape, DevOps aims to make software releases faster and frequent through continuous integration, continuous development, continuous testing, automation, continuous deployment, and more.

Introduced in 2009 to overcome various challenges of agile development and remove the barriers between developers and system administrators, DevOps has since evolved into a more concrete and beneficial practice that has gained tremendous popularity among industries worldwide.

DevOps is an amalgamation of Dev and Ops that automates every stage of the software development lifecycle, improving efficiency by eliminating the boundaries between the two phases of software development and optimizing time and resources for enhanced productivity, understanding, and training. Moreover, DevOps implementation throughout the development pipeline offers developers control over the product infrastructure, which helps prioritize software performance over any other purpose.

DevOps lifecycle consists of six important phases, planning, build, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), monitoring, operate, and feedback, wherein the teams collaborate and communicate to maintain alignment, velocity, and software quality.

For a comprehensive understanding of DevOps, check out the complete guide here.

Key Elements of DevOps:

Some of the main elements that form DevOps are:

• Continuous Integration: Involves regularly integrating the code changes into a shared repository or source code platform several times a day, which is then tested through automation.
• Continuous Delivery:  This is an important DevOps practice that expands upon Continuous integration. Here changes in the code are automatically built, tested, and prepared for release to the production environment.
• Configuration Management: It helps automate, monitor, design, and manage tedious tasks and manual configuration processes, enabling the organization to increase agility and increase efficiency.
• Microservices:  Microservices or Microservice Architecture is an architectural approach to building applications. These are distributed and loosely coupled enabling the development of applications that are highly maintainable and testable, independently deployable, etc.
• Infrastructure as a Code:  IaC is the management of software infrastructure such as load balancers, networks, virtual machines, etc. It involves using code or versioning to control and automate computing devices.
• Policy as Code:  Unlike IaC, PaC involves the use of working code to control and automate policies. It allows teams to deploy the best practices as policies to ensure automated cost control, compliance to avoid downtime securing resources, etc.
• Automation:  Another important element of DevOps, automation involves technology integration to perform tasks with reduced or zero human assistance. It helps shorten the feedback loops between the dev and operations team, allowing them to deploy iterative updates to the production environment faster and consistently.

Now that we have an understanding of DevOps, let us move on to unraveling the concepts of DevSecOps.

DevSecOps:

DevSecOps came into being to overcome the security challenges in DevOps and became another major cultural shift in the field of software development. DevSecOps is a methodology that fuses DevOps with extensive security to support the accelerated development of a stable codebase. Today, organizations worldwide are rapidly switching to DevSecOps for software and application development, considering the higher level of proficiency it offers in security.

Similar to DevOps, DevSecOps relies on automation to automate every aspect of the development pipeline, including security audits. From testing for potential security exploits to building business-driven security services using prominent tools, DevSecOps ensures security is built into applications rather than being integrated haphazardly afterward.

From the pre-commit stage to build, testing, and deployment, the process involves multiple checks with the help of various automated tools for complete security validation.

Initially, DevSecOps was focused primarily on automating the code security and testing. However, now it also encompasses more operations-centric controls and enables organizations to run their operations on various Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud for rapid delivery and enhanced security.

Other advantages offered by DevSecOps includes:

• It automates, standardizes, and shifts security processes leftward.
• Balances the prioritization of development activity and security in tandem.
• Offers support to applications with flexible structure and development processes.
• Bring the Development, Operations, and Security team together to ensure consistent assistance and improvement.

Key Element of DevSecOps:

Some of the key elements that characterize DevSecOps are:

• Shifting Security Left:  This is one of the core elements of DevSecOps that helps differentiate it from DevOps. The shifting security left approach involves moving security tasks to earlier stages of the development cycle, which prevents security breaches and other critical issues that impact the performance, quality, and usability of the application.
• Continuous Feedback Loop:  Another integral part of DevSecOps, continuous feedback loop enables team members to regularly improve the software development and maintenance. Here, the team, including the developers and security professionals, continuously monitors the automated processes to identify threats and collaboratively apply fixes. This is made possible by the automated processes that constantly control the software for warnings or security issues and provide real-time alerts.
• Automated Security:  Similar to DevOps, DevSecOps also embraces automation to ensure the security of code delivery in the CI/CD environment. Organizations use tools like Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to continuously check and identify any potential issues early in the development cycle and take necessary actions to prevent them.
• Security as Code: This is a type of DevSecOps, where the team combines the security protocols into the standard DevOps pipeline, policies, practices, and automated tools, which helps streamline the testing, making it more efficient and agile.

DevOps Vs. DevSecOps:

DevOps and DevSecOps are similar concepts that together help improve collaboration and communication within organizations and teams and allow organizations to build a quality and secure product. So, let us some up the major concepts of DevOps and DevSecOps, with the following side-by-side comparison:

DevOps	DevSecOps
Aims at bridging the gap between Development and IT Operations teams for better collaboration. Improves team productivity, enhances efficiency and speeds up the software delivery process. Helps unite activities related to development, quality assurance, deployment, and integration for continuous delivery. Offers advantages like speed, rapid delivery, reliability, scalability, and collaboration.	Automates core security tasks by embedding security controls and processes into the DevOps workflow. Incorporate security into every step of the DevOps development pipeline for enhanced security. Validates software building blocks without affecting or slowing down the development lifecycle. Offers advantages like improved agility, security automation, security as a code, and collaboration.

Conclusion:

Since consumer and market demands are changing constantly, the evolution of technology will continue to remain never-ending. In the past few years, DevOps have become an integral part of technology-driven and successful organizations. However, the coming years will witness a monumental shift towards DevSecOps, the technology has already become a growing movement.

In short, the scope and future of DevOps and DevSecOps will continue to evolve and flourish to meet the growing and diverse requirements of the futuristic businesses as well as to propel their growth.