ControlMonkey has extended its platform for automating infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to add an ability to reprovision network services following a disruption in service.
Company CEO Aharon Twizer said this extension to the Cloud Configuration Disaster Recovery platform, which the company launched last year, makes it possible to use Terraform code to programmatically reconfigure networking services among others provided by Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai and F5.
The platform in addition to capturing server configurations now also automatically captures daily snapshots of network control-plane components — including route tables, cloud delivery network (CDN) configurations, security groups, firewall rules, Domain Name System (DNS) records, and edge routing policies.
Additionally, DevOps teams can track configuration drift in real-time while continuously monitoring cloud and network configuration changes to prevent unauthorized or risky modifications, noted Twizer.
Finally, DevOps teams are also now provided with centralized insight into how infrastructure is configured from the cloud to the network edge, he added.
Those capabilities collectively promise to make it significantly easier for DevOps teams to restore services in the event of an outage or cyberattack at a time when there is an increasing number of these incidents, said Twizer.
In an ideal world, infrastructure and networking services would be configured in a way that minimizes these events, but mistakes will continue to be made, especially as the number of services being provisioned by either a human or artificial intelligence (AI) agent continues to exponentially increase.
The ControlMonkey platform is based on multiple types of deterministic and generative AI technologies that generate Terraform code that is tailored for specific cloud computing environments. ControlMonkey has also added AI agents to its infrastructure automation platform that promise to make it simpler for almost any developer to securely provision infrastructure as code (IaC).
It’s not clear how aggressively DevOps teams are looking to centralize the management of provisioning of infrastructure. However, many application developers, in the name of expediency, assumed responsibility for it, as part of an effort to accelerate the pace at which applications are built and deployed. Unfortunately, application developers have limited cybersecurity expertise, so misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure services is now rampant. More troubling still, cybercriminals are now generally very adept at discovering misconfigurations they now know well how to exploit.
Rather than requiring application developers to hopefully write better Terraform code on their own, ControlMonkey is making a case for a platform that embeds best practices to enable application developers to consistently generate more reliable IaC code and, when necessary, reconfigure services. That latter capability is crucial because it ultimately determines how resilient any IT organization can really be when recovering from any type of disruption, noted Twizer.
Each IT team, of course, will need to determine what level of automation to apply to the management of IT infrastructure. However, as the number of incidents involving issues stemming from the use of IaC tools steadily increases, the longer it takes to address them the bigger the potential blast radius of any given IT incident is likely to be.
