Harness Guardrails and Resilience

As modern DevOps continues to grow in complexity, controlling environments, from CI/CD pipelines to managing costs and user access, has become an essential part of operations. As environments scale, they can become increasingly intricate, where even minor errors can lead to significant disruptions. To mitigate these risks, it's crucial to employ tools that not only automate infrastructure management but also ensure compliance and resilience.

At the intersection of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Chaos Engineering, two essential practices stand out: Open Policy Agent (OPA) for governance and Chaos Engineering with tools like Harness ChaosGuard for resilience. When used together, these technologies provide a comprehensive framework to maintain stability and security in dynamic environments.

Open Policy Agent: Your Guardrail in IaC

As IaC becomes a cornerstone of DevOps, the ability to enforce policies automatically is critical. OPA allows you to define and implement rules, ensuring every infrastructure aspect aligns with organizational standards. This is especially important as you scale environments where manual compliance checks are neither practical nor efficient.

For instance, OPA can enforce policies that prevent publicly accessible S3 buckets or ensure that Kubernetes deployments include resource limits. By integrating OPA into your IaC workflows, you can automate these checks, ensuring that all deployments meet compliance requirements before they go live.

The following examples show how you can apply restrictions on server instance sizes or ensure that infrastructure changes are kept within a cost threshold:

EC2 Instance Size Restrictions: Control resource usage by enforcing instance size limits, such as allowing only `t3.medium` or more minor instances.  

package ec2.instance_size

   default allow = false

   allow {
       input.instance_type == "t3.medium"
   }

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Cost Management Policies: Set policies that prevent deployments that would exceed a predefined budget, helping you maintain control over cloud spending.

package budget.enforcement

   deny[reason] {
       input.cost_estimate > input.max_budget
       reason := sprintf("Deployment cost estimate (%v) exceeds budget limit.", [input.cost_estimate])
   }

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These examples illustrate how OPA can automate compliance within your infrastructure, allowing your team to focus on innovation rather than manual policy enforcement.

ChaosGuard: Resilience as Code

While OPA keeps your infrastructure compliant, ChaosGuard ensures it’s resilient. Chaos Engineering is all about embracing failure and learning from it—because in the real world, things go wrong, and it’s better to be prepared. But running chaos experiments can be daunting, especially when you're worried about causing disruption in production. This is where ChaosGuard steps in.

ChaosGuard is your safety net for Chaos Engineering. It’s designed to run chaos experiments with a level of caution, allowing you to test your systems' resilience without crossing the line into chaos for chaos’s sake. Think of it as a controlled explosion: you get the insights you need without the risk of blowing everything up.

By implementing ChaosGuard, you can define the boundaries for your experiments, such as who can execute the experiment, what chaos faults can be included in the experiment, where the faults can be injected (in which scope), which workload or microservice will be subject to chaos, how the fault is executed (such as using an experiment manifest or user input from the UI, and when the fault is executed (time period during which the experiment executed).

ChaosGuard can be implemented in three ways:

1. Visual: For more information on the visual way of configuring ChaosGuard, go to Define Constraints using Visual Editor.
2. YAML: For more information on configuring ChaosGuard using YAML, go to Define Constraints using YAML. 

Harness AIDA: For more information on configuring ChaosGuard using Harness AIDA, go to Define Constraints using Harness AIDA.

faultSpec:
 operator: EQUAL_TO
 faults:
   - faultType: FAULT
     name: pod-network-*
k8sSpec:
 infraSpec:
   operator: EQUAL_TO
   infraIds:
     - 5a7314dc-af0d-4e5b-bbd7-24f351c8cc6f
 applicationSpec:
   operator: EQUAL_TO
   workloads:
     - label: app=nginx
       namespace: default
       kind: ""
       applicationMapId: ""
 chaosServiceAccountSpec:
   operator: EQUAL_TO
   serviceAccounts:
     - litmus-admin
infraType: Kubernetes

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Conclusion:

In an era where infrastructure complexity is ever-increasing, ensuring that your systems are both compliant and resilient is more crucial than ever. By integrating OPA policies into your IaC processes, you automate compliance checks that safeguard your deployments. At the same time, employing Chaos Engineering with tools like ChaosGuard allows you to test your system’s resilience in a controlled, systematic way.

Harness offers a platform that brings these capabilities together, helping you tackle the challenges of modern infrastructure management. With Harness IaCM and Chaos Engineering, you can ensure that your infrastructure is not only compliant but also robust enough to withstand the unexpected.

To learn more about how Harness can help you manage and secure your infrastructure at scale, checkout more IaCM features and get an introduction to leveraging Chaos Engineering with ChaosGuard.

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