The DevSecOps Technology Radar showcases the opinions cloud-native groups have about DevSecOps tools. To review, The Technology Radar is a periodic report from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a burgeoning host for new open source projects that are becoming pivotal underpinnings to cloud-native architecture at large.
Just like previous radars, the DevSecOps Technology Radar was assembled using feedback from the CNCF end-user community, which is a group of over 155 organizations that use cloud-native technologies to build and distribute their services, spanning startups and enterprises. The Radar report organizes popular tools into adopt, trial and/or assess status, based on a technology’s active use and its maturity.
‘Adopt’ means these tools are stable and come highly recommended for use in production systems.
‘Trial’ means users have had some success with these tools, and it is recommended that others consider them.
‘Assess’ means these are promising tools that are good for solving specific needs.
So, why was DevSecOps selected as this Radar’s theme? According to the Radar team, DevSecOps was chosen because it is highly relevant to current development focuses. “We realized that more than half of the tools we were using in CI/CD were actually security-oriented,” said Sergiu Petean, head of DevOps at Allianz Direct. This goes beyond DevOps—”this is definitely an uppercase ‘Sec’,” he said.
“More than half of our time is spent discussing designs around security,” said Keith Nielsen, director, cloud architecture at Discover Financial Services. Financial services especially must find innovative methods to balance speed-to-market with security. Nielsen also cited the rapid rate of change in this space, which requires companies to continually reevaluate their security posture.
DevSecOps Radar Results
So, where did the CNCF end-user community place popular DevSecOps tools? The Radar ended up rating 16 tools across the three different levels:
- Adopt: Istio, Sonarqube, Artifactory, Hashicorp Vault, Calico/Tigera, Terraform, ArgoCD and OPA.
- Trial: XRay.
- Assess: Cilium, Harness, SonaType Nexus, Hashicorp Sentinel, GitHub Actions, Linkerd and Trivy.
The above results were based on 252 votes from end users across 35 tools, with most respondents coming from large companies across multiple sectors.
Out of these tools, Terraform collected the highest number of ‘Adopt’ votes. This technology aids the move toward infrastructure-as-code (IaC) with declarative configuration files, which is important for DevSecOps automation. Tied for second place were Hashicorp Vault and Artifactory, indicating that secrets management, access control and continuous updates for security are pressing requirements.
Other open source tools on the Radar are providing impressive ways to unify security controls. For example, OPA is a universal layer for applying policies that could help unite fragmented authorization across applications. Or, service mesh options like Linkerd and Istio place a sidecar proxy around applications to centrally manage access control, observability and networking across a large microservices ecosystem. Such projects are programmable to fit into the DevSecOps pipeline.
Analysis
In general, the radar team was somewhat surprised to see such a high number of security tools in use today. Some tools compete in the same arena, making hunting for the right tool challenging. “The sheer number of products is a bit staggering … what we’re seeing is a highly fractured strategy from different companies,” explained Nielsen, who said he expected more consolidation on capabilities.
After evaluating the DevSecOps tooling landscape, The Radar team organized their core findings into three main takeaways:
Usability is compromised at the expense of security. Security features are necessary, but they often come at the cost of usability. The DevSecOps Radar team found that the developer experience for most tools is poor. Many disparate tools must be stitched together to have a truly automated pipeline which is cumbersome to implement. “The tools are getting better, but still there’s not a cohesive, prescriptive way to develop for the cloud,” said Nielsen.
The pace of change in the security space is rapid. Major cloud providers continue to rapidly release new services, which has led to an explosion in new tools. Simultaneously, the speed of innovation is accelerating within companies, opening up unique security needs. Combined, this means the security landscape is constantly shifting. “Security tools are trying to keep up with the services and how you host them and run them,” Nielsen said. “We definitely weren’t expecting to see so many newcomers in the security space,” Petean agreed. Though DevSecOps is spoiled for choice these days, “it’s always better to have options,” he added.
Microsegmentation is important but presents a significant challenge. Many great tools enable companies to improve how they segment traffic, such as service mesh tools like Linkerd and Istio. However, implementing cloud-native microsegmentation is bumping against legacy implementations for established companies. Between API gateways, service mesh, edge firewalls and Kubernetes federated firewall functions, DevSecOps has much complexity to deal with, Nielsen said.
The DevSecOps Technology Radar: In Review
In recent years, cloud-native technology has placed increasing emphasis on solving the security puzzle. Companies continue to reevaluate their security approach in light of cloud-native strategies, novel vulnerabilities and new compliance requirements. DevSecOps is proving to be a useful, if not necessary, practice to maintain both security and rapid software delivery.
With new security tools and unique approaches coming out so frequently, it’s easy to have “analysis paralysis.” However, DevSecOps must start somewhere. And, for those who trust the opinions of the CNCF Technology Radar, you now have some helpful insights on where to begin.
