Simplicity is a form of art...

Integrating or customizing SaaS within your own cloud environment

Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are often a quick way to get new capabilities into an organization’s portfolio. Smaller SaaS solutions are simple, web-based solutions which barely integrate with the organization’s other solutions, besides the identity and access management (which is often handled by federated authentication).

More complex or intermediate solutions require more integration focus, and a whole new market of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) solutions came up to facilitate cross-cloud integrations. But even without the iPaaS offerings, integrations are often a mandatory part to leverage the benefits of the newly activated SaaS solution.

In this post I want to bring some thoughts on the integrations that might be needed to support customizing a SaaS solution.

An IT services overview

My current role within the company I work for is “domain architect”, part of the enterprise architects teams. The domain I am accountable for is “infrastructure”, which can be seen as a very broad one. Now, I’ve been maintaining an overview of our IT services before I reached that role, mainly from an elaborate interest in the subject, as well as to optimize my efficiency further.

Becoming a domain architect allows me to use the insights I’ve since gathered to try and give appropriate advice, but also now requires me to maintain a domain architecture. This structure is going to be the starting point of it, although it is not the true all and end all of what I would consider a domain architecture.

The three additional layers in the OSI model

At my workplace, I jokingly refer to the three extra layers on top of the OSI network model as a way to describe the difficulties of discussions or cases. These three additional layers are Financial Layer, Politics Layer and Religion Layer, and the idea is that the higher up you go, the more challenging discussions will be.

Virtualization vs abstraction

When an organization has an extensively large, and heterogeneous infrastructure, infrastructure architects will attempt to make itless complex and chaotic by introducing and maintaining a certain degree of standardization. While many might consider standardization as a rationalization (standardizing on a single database technology, single vendor for hardware, etc.), rationalization is only one of the many ways in which standards can simplify such a degree of complexity.

In this post, I'd like to point out two other, very common ways to standardize the IT environment, without really considering a rationalization: abstraction and virtualization.

SELinux System Administration 3rd Edition

As I mentioned previously, recently my latest installment of "SELinux System Administration" has been released by Packt Publishing. This is already the third edition of the book, after the first (2013) and second (2016) editions have gotten reasonable success given the technical and often hard nature of full SELinux administration.

Like with the previous editions, this book remains true to the public of system administrators, rather than SELinux policy developers. Of course, SELinux policy development is not ignored in the book.

Abstracting infrastructure complexity

IT is complex. Some even consider it to be more magic than reality. And with the ongoing evolutions and inventions, the complexity is not really going away. Sure, some IT areas are becoming easier to understand, but that is often offset with new areas being explored.

Companies and organizations that have a sizeable IT footprint generally see an increase in their infrastructure, regardless of how many rationalization initiatives that are started. Personally, I find it challenging, in a fun way, to keep up with the onslaught of new technologies and services that are onboarded in the infrastructure landscape that I'm responsible for.

But just understanding a technology isn't enough to deal with its position in the larger environment.

Working on infra strategy

After a long hiatus, I'm ready to take up blogging again on my public blog. With my day job becoming more intensive and my side-job taking the remainder of the time, I've since quit my work on the Gentoo project. I am in process of releasing a new edition of the SELinux System Administration book, so I'll probably discuss that more later.

Today, I want to write about a task I had to do this year as brand new domain architect for infrastructure.

cvechecker 3.9 released

Thanks to updates from Vignesh Jayaraman, Anton Hillebrand and Rolf Eike Beer, a new release of cvechecker is now made available.

This new release (v3.9) is a bugfix release.

Automating compliance checks

With the configuration baseline for a technical service being described fully (see the first, second and third post in this series), it is time to consider the validation of the settings in an automated manner. The preferred method for this is to use Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL), which is nowadays managed by the Center for Internet Security, abbreviated as CISecurity. Previously, OVAL was maintained and managed by Mitre under NIST supervision, and Google searches will often still point to the old sites. However, documentation is now maintained on CISecurity's github repositories.

But I digress...

Documenting a rule

In the first post I talked about why configuration documentation is important. In the second post I looked into a good structure for configuration documentation of a technological service, and ended with an XCCDF template in which this documentation can be structured.

The next step is to document the rules themselves, i.e. the actual content of a configuration baseline.