The Lab with Brendan O’Leary EP 19

Hello friends and welcome to the lab a monthly show where we're looking the latest and greatest developments in software development devops and the cloud I'm your host Brendan O'Leary and I'm coming today from a seasonably warm. Very nice. Weather Annapolis, Maryland on the east coast of the United States for those who don't know me.

I'm a Staff developer of angels. They get lab which means I get to talk to amazing folks throughout the software engineering space about what it really means to get code shipped into production. 5 release brings new Cutting Edge devops capabilities to get Labs one devops platform.

And so we have as always have excited new exciting new product updates that are going to help developers and operators collaborate and deliver software more securely. 5 comes updates to our environment overview page. A lot of API improvements that I think will be really valuable for folks on a lot more.

We also have a new technology partnership with flyer fly a cloud Asset Management solution for devops and SRE teams. And today I have with me here a gitlab veteran and fireflies VP of marketing Sidney Blake who will join us later on the show to discuss this new partnership and what it means for devops teams. But before that we'll dive into some key gitlab updates.

5 there's some fantastic updates as I mentioned. One of the most critical ones I think is operational container scanning. So this is gitlab now supporting not only container scanning as you're building the container, right which has been in gitlab for some time but also vulnerability scanning of container images that are operational in your production kubernetes environments.

So you can set up scanning either through the configuration file that you use for your gitlab agent for kubernetes or creating a scan execution policy that requires a regular Cadence of scan. And so this will make sure that not only when you build your containers are they secure but as you're running them and new things may come up new CVS are released. You can scan those containers on a regular basis and understand if they need to be updated to patch any security issues.

Related to this kind of is the ability to Now search by environment name in the environment's overview page. So previously on the environments overview page, it was just kind of a list didn't have any search functionality, which if you only have a few environments like production and staging and maybe Canary that's not that big a deal. But if you're building a new environment maybe for each, you know, each branch each merger Quest so that you can test the application before merging it or if you have a lot of other longer lived environments.

Maybe you want to be able to search and find that specific environment understand what's been deployed there and you know find that so that's really exciting to see Another feature that I think is really exciting are a lot of updates to the gitlab API. 5 release I think make it even more so so one is a new Project's API endpoint that Returns the list of groups where you can transfer us a specified project. So for transferring projects, you know, you can select you know, whatever namespace that you have access to as the user but now for api-based transfers you can find out you know, what are those namespaces available before trying to execute that transfer?

You can also modify a user's commit email through the user's API used to only be able to do that in the UI as the user themselves. But now if you're managing a lot of users administrators can use that users API to modify the commit email address and you know perform bulk actions if there's a need for that. You also can expose the job token scope status.

4 where users can limit the access scope of a cijob token, right? So that gives you a much more secure workflow, right? That's CI job token can be used by the CI job to perform, you know various API and other calls and get lab and so limiting the scope of that makes a lot of sense and many environments.

5, you can check the response from the jobs deployments and environments API endpoints to programmatically figure out, you know, what was the status of the setting for those various environments? So that's really exciting. some other, you know, maybe more minor enhancements but still important I think include an admin area setting to prevent users from creating new groups.

So now gitlab administrators can you know disable the ability for people to create top-level groups? rb file that has configuration settings, but now it's available right in the admin area of gitlab. and a little a minor but important enhancement that I'm excited about our new filters available for personal access tokens API, so Previously when you called the API to find your personal accent access tokens, it was relatively basic but now you can filter the results like on things when when was the token last use if it was revoked or not and what the name of the token was.

And so this again provides users and administrators more useful information about personal access tokens, which of course are important to securing your gitlab instance. And again, these are only a handful of the many many updates in gitlab this month. 5 I definitely would encourage you to you know, go to the gitlab blog and read that full list of updates.

Now I'm excited to dive into gitlabs newly announced partnership with firefly that we talked about at the top of the show. And this is with none other than the one and only Cindy Blake who's previously joined the lab as a guest and has a lot to tell us about this new partnership analysis announcement Sydney. Welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me Brendan. I'm happy to be back. Great.

Yeah, and so you've been the lead on this new announcement Sydney. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about you know what Firefly is and what this partnership with gitlab means sure of course, so Firefly is a cloud infrastructure management solution. We take a holistic approach to solving Cloud complexity ensuring that your cloud is efficiently managed and properly governed for more reliable secure and predictable environment.

So getting you know train unpacking that a little bit in terms of what does that mean? We enable teams to ReDiscover their entire Cloud footprint to understand which parts of your Cloud are codified as IAC versus unmanaged. We help you detect and remediate drifts and manage a single inventory of all of your Cloud resources across multiple clouds multiple accounts and even kubernetes deployments.

Our goal is to provide businesses with a piece of mind to avoid costly downtimes minimize risk of failure by mitigating drifts and replacing manual effort with automated processes that enable faster feature release with less effort and more consistent results. And we've just announced that we're now members of gitlab's partner program as a technology partner and which that's going to further enable devops teams to manage their complete Cloud infrastructure alongside their application code with greater visibility and control just like they get for application code with devops. That makes a lot of sense.

And yeah, it's really exciting to have. Firefly on as a partner and you know, I was looking to get Labs been building up this Alliance partner Network. I think it's very much in line with our everyone can contribute Mission and in the last year actually we saw an almost 300% increase in Alliance Partners onboarded 292% In fact And our approach is you know, extremely collaborative right?

It's one of our our key values as you're well aware. And that's helped us really create this you know Cloud native Cloud agnostic devops ecosystem with you know, Integrations and services that support, you know, the entire software life cycle. And so sitting I'd like to hear more on you know, what Firefly I think I understand what it brings.

But you know, why is now the the time the right time for this partnership and and what do you think about that? And cloud is becoming super complex with a surge of cloud native applications and the burden of managing infrastructure. It's really increased exponentially.

In fact, we have a survey going on right now that's proving that point already and more companies are using multiple Cloud providers and according to a cncf survey 96% of the surveyed are using or consider using kubernetes. So you've got a lot of different parts and that have to be managed and so to meet the the primary challenge of governing that you know, thinking about who can access what what changed and keeping all of that straight organizations have been codifying their Cloud assets. So things like kubernetes clusters AWS security groups identity access management S3 storage buckets, and all of those things into infrastructure's code or IAC using tools like terraform palumi Helm and such and the reason why is IAC helps teams more efficiently manage deploy and govern Out infrastructures.

So in a devops environment, it helps developers be more self-sufficient to efficiently provision the cloud resources that they need while at the same time employing guardrails for consistency reliability and less risk and once the codified as IEC. These Cloud resources can be version controlled and governed with the same rigor AS application software all within a devops platform like gitlab. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And so you talked about you know, infrastructure as code and and you know, we hear folks talk about get Ops like are these things that you know are now kind of table stakes and essential and you know, if so, why is that what's the benefit to organizations for for trying to you know, make these these Investments. Yeah, absolutely, you know for companies that are cloud-forward with multiple Cloud providers and and we see hundreds and even thousands of cloud service accounts achieving governance for that is super difficult. So cloud and kubernetes management tools that exist are often siled.

Maybe only addressing part of the cloud fit print or they may have a very narrow focus on just inventory or just fin Ops, you know others focus on drift or on security and we really believe that a holistic Cloud management will improve all of these areas. You know in addition a lot of people focus on custom applications developed through devops themes but reliability is important for your entire Cloud infrastructure, you know, it's not only important for custom software but for Mission critical business processes that depend upon commercial off the shelf SAS applications and that area is often overlooked the infrastructure that comes with those so managing everything as IEC using this good Ops approach can improve reliability governance and control and you know, the only shortcoming is that it can only address Cloud resources that have been codified. You can't manage what you can't see so fireflies partnership with gitlab takes these principles a step further by applying the automated and policy driven software management techniques that get lab is so good at to the entire Cloud footprint including unmanaged assets and SAS infrastructures.

essentially enabling an automated and governed end-to-end Cloud Ops It makes sense. Yeah, it's exciting to hear, you know, kind of taking that to the next level with with giveaway. Like you said, you've got a if you you can't manage what you don't know about so that makes a lot of sense.

And so before we wrap up City, maybe you could talk about some of the more specific like functionalities and Integrations that get lab and and fireflies joint users. Can you know expect from from our partnership? Yeah, absolutely with this partnership.

There's two key Integrations that I encourage listeners to try out. io and give it a try. These were going to help you meet best practices for cloud asset management and we'll help you automate your IAC processes.

So first we can help you transform Cloud resources into IAC automatically. So we turn unmanaged Cloud resources into things like terraform palumi Helm whatever your favorite is and go a step further by creating a merge request automatically so that you can and within your control time when you choose to do so push that change directly to your gitlab repo, you know, where you're managing your IAC configuration files, and secondly we help you detect and fix configuration drift. It's it's not enough to just find it.

You also need to know. How to fix it so Firefly continuously scans your IAC States and your actual Cloud configuration to find misalignments and then alert you immediately, um, it goes a step further by suggesting the fix for the drift according to best practices and again creating that gitlab Mr. For you you we believe that the path to a better optimized more secure and more reliable Cloud environment requires that holistic effort based on policy driven Cloud asset management, and it's only natural to combine these capabilities with gitlab for the one devops platform to manage your applications and your infrastructure.

Great. Yeah. Well, thanks Cindy so much for coming.

We're so happy that you could join us on the lab again, always appreciate your insights and I'm looking forward to what comes next of these tighter Integrations. io. com.

So thanks so much again for watching today. You can find me on the internet as at O'Leary crew most places. Twitter's where I spend most of my time, so if you have an idea for a future episode, I want to discuss anything from today's episode my DMs are open I'd be happy to talk to you.

Again, the lab is published monthly. So thanks again for joining us and I'll see you next month in the lab. Stay safe.