Azure Defender for DevOps – First Impressions

The recent batch of high profile security incidents at various companies in Australia highlights the need for appropriate security measures across all components of an organisation’s infrastructure. Defender for DevOps is a new functional addon (in preview) to Defender for Cloud. It provides security functionality for your code respositories and associated components.

Setup

When navigating to the Defender for Cloud interface, a new option will appear under the “Cloud Security” heading.

The new DevOps Security option

Once we click on this, we are presented with an intro splash page with steps to getting started. The first step is to connect to the environments. Both Azure DevOps and Github repositories are supported environments.

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Developing a Bicep Validation Pipeline

Azure’s Bicep is Microsoft’s newer format for defining Azure resources as code. In terms of look and feel, it’s very similar to Terraform.. If one considers Bicep files as code, then it would be a natural step to ensure that code meets a certain level of quality. In addition to that level of quality, because Bicep is deploying infrastructure, we would want to ensure that infrastructure is well designed and has a chance of successfully deploying.

When Bicep started to be adopted by the team I was working in, I became involved in designing a process to meet those quality goals as well as reduce the number of deployment issues.

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