I’m a bit of a fan of JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor (video below, you’re welcome), so when I was invited to chat with co-founder and CEO of tech startup Fugue, I was intrigued. The fact that the meeting took place over (hard to believe it) a pretty decent double espresso in Vegas of all places, and the fact that I’m actually pretty excited about what Fugue is doing, sealed the deal for me.
First some context. For a few years now I’ve been talking about broad automation fabrics being the key driver of enterprise agility going forwards. This isn’t just buzzword bingo – the reality is that modern enterprises are more complex than ever before – they use a myriad of different infrastructure patterns and managing all of that is hard. I’ve also been a critic of current management and monitoring offerings as they tend to (in my view) only deliver half of the equation: the expose the issues but don’t automate the actions. Or they automate actions, but not with a tie-in to monitoring intelligence.
This is where Fugue comes in – created by some folks with deep AWS experience, Fugue is all about policy-driven automation. Essentially what Fugue offers is a virtual appliance that organizations can load with corporate rules, regulatory policies and their particular IT practices. Once those policies are in place, Fugue automagically takes care of management – ensuring scale and policy adherence. Josh Stella, the aforementioned espresso-drinking Fugue co-founder, told me that Fugue keeps a watch on infrastructure and automatically heals any anomalies on a 30-second rotation. It also won’t let an operator deploy infrastructure that doesn’t adhere to the organization’s policies.
Fugue is today releasing the latest version of its offering, which aims to deepen the value proposition by further preventing infrastructure misconfigurations. The offering delivers visibility into AWS workloads already running, validates them against compliance policies, and continuously enforces cloud correctness. According to Stella, companies migrating their existing workloads to Fugue will get:
- Total visibility: Easily see all running cloud workloads and their corresponding policy infractions and vulnerabilities
- More control: Unify policy-as-code and infrastructure-as-code into infrastructure blueprints and assert automated runtime enforcement to prevent configuration drift
- Increased speed: Eliminate manual security and compliance gates to provide developers the freedom to deploy applications faster
Visualizing and Implementing Cloud Governance for AWS Environments
Building on Fugue’s core solution for managing cloud infrastructure the new technology spans the infrastructure governance lifecycle and starts with Fugue’s Composer, an application for generating diagrams of cloud resources based on new or existing AWS workloads.
Next, Fugue’s design-time policy validations are applied to determine if any services are out of compliance with selected rules, regulations or standards. Visual indicators show where misconfigurations and potential exposures exist and provide corrective feedback for real-time remediation.
From there, teams can choose to have the Fugue Conductor—Fugue’s runtime orchestration and enforcement engine—inspect these resources to ensure policies are automatically enforced in production. All AWS services are inspected every 30 seconds, and any drift or potential exposure is immediately and automatically repaired.
MyPOV
This is the kind of fairy dust that many promise, but few deliver. I was intrigued by Stella’s view on the tension between going super deep in terms of single platform automation on AWS versus (for example) broadening and allowing the same kind of self-healing automation for traditional on-premises workloads or other cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, anyone?) Stella’s response was that it is a balancing act but that the company is actively looking to broaden beyond simply being a one-trick AWS pony – watch this space.
I really like the Fugue proposition and am looking forward to seeing future developments.
Organ (or-gahn: noun) The most powerful thing created by man that doesn’t explode.