Accelerating DevSecOps with Connext

Note: See the full document in the attached PDF file.

Introduction

Over the past decade, containerization has captured the attention of the engineering community across all verticals due to the compelling benefits it offers to software development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) teams. Containerization enhances and accelerates DevSecOps by promoting software consistency, test automation, fault reproducibility and early detection of security vulnerabilities, ultimately leading to more robust and secure service deployments.

Some of the key benefits of containerization include:

• Isolation and Consistency: Containers encapsulate an application and its dependencies, ensuring consistent behavior across various environments. This helps eliminate "it works on my machine" issues and provides a consistent base for testing and validation.

• Portability: Containers allow you to package the application along with its dependencies, making it easier to manage different versions of the application, even when rolled out to heterogeneous deployment environments.

• Scalability: Containers can be quickly scaled up or down based on demand. This scalability enables efficient resource utilization and helps in managing performance concerns related to sudden spikes in traffic or loads.

Moreover, containers are an integral part of modern Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Containerized build environments, automated test platforms and artifact generation are some of the most common use cases. The output of a CI/CD pipeline is typically a tested and hardened container that is uploaded to a container repository. Containers are also well-suited for microservices architectures, in which large distributed systems are composed of many single-purpose, loosely-coupled services that can be scaled on demand. Containerization enables better segmentation of microservices, making it easier to isolate, design, and deploy individual components.