On Unifying the Compliance Management of Applications Based on IaC Automation

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) technologies are used to automate the deployment of cloud applications. They promote the usage of code to define and configure the IT infrastructure of cloud applications allowing them to benefit from conventional software development practices, which facilitates the rapid deployment of new versions of application infrastructures without sacrificing quality or stability. On the other hand, enterprise applications need to conform to compliance regarding external regulations and internal policies. Many of these compliance rules affect the application architecture on which IaC code operates. However, managing the architectural compliance of IaC-based application deployments faces a number of challenges, such as configuration drift and the heterogeneity of IaC technologies. Therefore, in this work, we present a vision on how to uniformly manage the compliance of the infrastructure of applications that utilize heterogeneous IaC technologies for deployment automation. To this end, we introduce an initial design for the IaC-based Architectural Compliance Management Framework and discuss how it addresses the corresponding challenges.