If you’ve ever been in the trenches of DevOps, you know the drill: move fast, maintain reliability, and—somehow—don’t break security in the process. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and I’ve lost count of the number of times my team and I had to juggle priorities, feeling the pressure of meeting deadlines while knowing every open port or IP address could be an attack vector waiting to happen. Here’s how I’m finally able to move faster and sleep better, thanks to the zero trust connectivity we’ve built at NetFoundry with Ziti.
The Real DevOps Struggle: Moving Fast Without Creating Vulnerabilities
DevOps isn’t just about building and deploying software; it’s about creating connectivity between systems: development environments, production servers, monitoring tools, CI/CD systems, data warehouses, even different cloud providers. Every time we “connect” something, we open another door for attackers to get in. Over the years, I’ve seen VPNs, VPC peering, MPLS connections, you name it. All of these solutions are SLOW to implement, difficult to manage, and they all have the common problem of heavily exposing one site to another the moment you connect them together.
Take VPNs, for instance. They’re great for creating a secure tunnel, but they’re still just a tunnel—everything on both ends is exposed. When you start adding multiple cloud regions or VPCs into the mix, you end up with a tangled mess of network configurations that’s a pain to secure and scale. And don’t even get me started on managing IPs, firewall rules, and access controls across clusters in Kubernetes. It was clear: if we were going to get serious about DevOps at scale, we needed a different approach.
Why Traditional Networking Slows DevOps Down
To connect our various systems, we were constantly having to open ports, configure firewalls, or set up VPNs to create the connectivity that we needed. Traditional network security is built around static systems that don’t change, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. Every time we open a port or punch a hole in a firewall, we introduce risk. As the Head of Devops, I had to ensure that the developers had access to the resources they needed without opening the entire production environment to everyone. It felt like every tool we added—monitoring, CI/CD, data management—added another layer of complexity and potential exposure.
Some key challenges I kept hitting were:
- VPN Limitations: VPNs made us feel secure, but they slowed everything down and weren’t flexible. Managing VPN access across our multi-cloud setup was clunky and constantly prone to configuration issues.
- VPC Peering Concerns: AWS’s VPC peering is straightforward at first, but it’s region specific, and as soon as you peer them together, your security is only as good as the weakest link. One compromised VPC will compromise them all.
- Multi-Cloud Complexity: As we started using multiple clouds, things got even messier. Peering and direct connections didn’t cover all our needs, and adding load balancers or complex mesh networking solutions only made things more fragile. The more environments we connected, the harder it was to keep everything secure and running smoothly.
- Kubernetes Networking Headaches: Managing networking and security within Kubernetes felt like a nightmare at times. Each cluster and pod communication required specific configurations and opened up potential vulnerabilities. Ensuring the right access for internal and external traffic was anything but simple.
Every tool we used was supposed to help us move faster, but the underlying infrastructure we had to build around them was slowing us down and constantly raising new security concerns.
Moving Faster with Zero Trust: How Ziti Changes the Game
Then came Ziti, NetFoundry’s zero trust platform. With Ziti, I could connect systems without worrying about exposing them. It’s what we call “making it dark”—there are no exposed IPs or open ports; every connection is identity-based and encrypted. Suddenly, it didn’t matter where something was deployed or how many environments we had, because everything was “invisible” to the outside world, and so much simpler to manage.
Here’s how it’s improved our workflows:
- No More Open Ports or Exposed IPs: Ziti eliminates open ports and uses identity-based access instead. This means I don’t have to leave holes in our firewall or worry about IP whitelisting. Every connection is authenticated and encrypted, so I’m not constantly second-guessing if we’ve secured our environment properly.
- Policy-Driven Access Management: Managing access used to mean configuring networks, assigning VPNs, and juggling firewall rules. Now, with Ziti, I just assign policies to specific identities—like users, services, or even applications. Policies control who gets access to what, and they’re way easier to adjust as we grow or change setups. A policy can be as simple as “#devops identities can access “#devops services”.
- Effortless Multi-Cloud and Multi-Cluster Connections: With Ziti, I can connect workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP without needing VPNs, peering, or load balancers. It’s all seamless and managed through Ziti, which lets me focus on running the applications instead of managing connections. I get the same zero trust security across environments without the hassle.
- Secure, Scalable Kubernetes Networking: Kubernetes networking can be a headache, but Ziti makes it simple by embedding zero trust right into the clusters. Whether it’s ingress or egress traffic, it’s all secured without open ports. I can scale up clusters or add new ones without worrying about the networking nightmares that usually come with it.
Six Use Cases Where Ziti is a Game-Changer for Us
Since switching to Ziti, I’ve seen the benefits across everything we do in DevOps:
- CI/CD: I can secure our CI/CD pipelines so that only authorized entities can access each stage of deployment, preventing accidental exposures in our code deployment.
- Monitoring: Our monitoring tools are “dark” now, so all data is transmitted without opening any ports, eliminating the risk of data leaks.
- ETL: We can centrally manage all of our ETL jobs without adding any new exposure to our database connections.
- Data Warehouses: Ziti ensures that only authenticated users can access our data warehouses, preventing unauthorized data extraction.
- Configuration Management: Configuration management tools can reach into distributed locations easily without ever opening up a port to the outside world.
- Developer Access: Devs get least-privilege access via Ziti, so they can work on production issues without risking broader exposure.
Moving with Speed and Security, Thanks to Ziti
With Ziti, I’m finally able to create the connectivity I need at speed without sacrificing a strong security model. We don’t have to slow down for complex network setups or worry about exposed services or ports. Ziti’s zero trust approach is secure by default, so I can focus on building and deploying rather than fighting with access control lists.
So, if you’re in DevOps and tired of the network hassle, take a look at zero trust with Ziti. It might just change how you work.
