With the rise of cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices, traditional methods of policy enforcement such as manual reviews and audits are no longer sufficient. By using code to express policies for the entire infrastructure and application stack, automated compliance checks become a natural part of the software development lifecycle, e.g. via integration into a projects' CI/CD pipeline and could even prevent a configuration change or deployment if a critical issue was found.
One of the key benefits of Policy as Code is the ability to catch potential issues before they become risks. For example, a policy could be defined to ensure that all S3 buckets are encrypted, or that all EC2 instances have a specific set of tags.
There are a number of tools and frameworks available for implementing Policy as Code. At AOE, we are mainly relying on Checkov, Kyverno and AWS Config at the time of writing. Each tool provides a way to define policies in code and then automate policy enforcement. They also provide visibility into the compliance status of infrastructure and application configurations.
By defining policies as code, development teams can ensure that policies are version-controlled, easily auditable, and consistent across all environments.