3 posts tagged with "security"

Cloud security reviews are usually quarterly. Configuration drift happens daily. Between review cycles, buckets get created, firewall rules get loosened, service accounts get reused, and a bucket that was locked down last quarter might not be locked down today. Nothing about the review cadence catches any of it.

Tutorial 1 in this series walked through auditing three clouds with stackql from your terminal. Tutorial 2 showed how the same query engine lets an agent read live state before mutating anything. This guide takes the same audit pattern and puts it in your CI, so the check runs every day, or on every pull request, or every hour, without anyone remembering to run it.

The tool is stackql-audit-action, a GitHub Action that runs an opinionated set of security checks against your cloud accounts and renders findings inline on the workflow run page. Setup is copy-paste. First results in under two minutes.

The problem with plan, review, apply​

Infrastructure-as-code was designed around human-speed changes: write a plan, review it, apply it, and use state snapshots to know what was managed before. That works best when writers are few and changes are infrequent.

Agents change those assumptions. They run continuously and multiple actors can touch the same resources at the same time. Drift is no longer exceptional. It is unavoidable and relentless.

Canonical IaC tools like Terraform still matter because they represent intent. What's weakened is their ability to reflect current reality. Agents rarely own the whole picture. They usually operate in narrow scopes, working on a slice of infrastructure that other agents, other tools, or humans are also touching. In that world, an agent will regularly encounter infrastructure that was mutated out of band, outside whatever IaC system nominally manages it.

Query-before-mutation handles this case. Read live cloud state, compare it with policy, apply a bounded policy gate, mutate only what is out of policy, then verify. Each run starts from reality rather than a cached view.

The demo takes about ten minutes and uses Google Cloud Storage bucket encryption, but the pattern is provider-agnostic.

If you've audited buckets in more than one cloud, you already know what this is like. Three consoles. Three CLIs. Three auth patterns. And a bit of glue code to pull the outputs together every time someone asks a question that spans all three.

The question is usually simple. "Which buckets are public across all our clouds?" You end up running three separate scripts, then reconciling three different output shapes just to give one answer.

This tutorial doesn't make that faster. It replaces it. One query, one view, all three clouds.