What Is Cloud Custodian?

Cloud technology has become essential for businesses, and the technology has helped them solve a wide array of problems. However, many businesses and organizations cite compliance and governance as a significant issue for them when dealing with cloud technology.

Open Source Popularity

According to Github, 20% of all GitHub interactions are done by people just wanting to interact with the cloud custodian. This is a huge number and shows how many people are turning to open source technology. Furthermore, it also shows that many people are beginning their open source journey by using cloud custodian.

What Is Cloud Custodian?

Cloud Custodian is a tool that allows multiple tools and scripts often used to manage one’s cloud operation to work together in a lightweight, easy to use platform.

It achieves this by using a stateless rules engine for policy definition and enforcement and is entirely open source. Cloud custodian can be bound to serverless event streams linking multiple cloud providers. Beyond this, it helps in other ways, including:

• Ensures real-time compliance based on user-defined policies

• Control energy and server costs by setting up hours where certain resources are turned off when they are not needed

• Multi-cloud supported and can run AWS, Azure, and GCP from anywhere

Cloud Custodian is a powerful piece of software and, as a result, requires some prerequisite knowledge to use correctly. The main knowledge requirement to use Cloud Custodian is enough AWS knowledge to interact with the AWS management console.

Why Use Cloud Custodian?

Compliance has become particularly challenging for developers, who are continually trying to keep up with changing compliance issues. “As compliance and governance changes, developers are constantly trying to find automated solutions to increase security and lower compliance costs,” writes Alfred Bensen, a tech writer at 1 Day 2 write and Origin Writings.

Cloud custodian is an open-source stateless rules engine that runs AWS environments and is responsible for consolidating several of the compliance scripts into lightweight and efficient.

The AWS development kit allows developers to create policy-as-code across AWS based resources using the Open Policy Agent. “Although Open Policy Agent allows individuals developing in the AWS environment to realize policy-as-code, this should really be seen as a preventative measure,” writes Jane Lamont, a cloud blogger at Writemyx and Brit Student.

With Cloud Custodia, developers can easily set rules that validate and enforce the environment in the face of environment and security and compliance requirements that may seem difficult at first.

Beyond this, AWS Lambda provides flexible event-driven code execution. This is important because each cloud custodian can employ its own lambda function, this means Amazing CloudWatch Events, AWS Cloud Trail Events, and many more. 

One of the main benefits of cloud technology is convenience, yet it’s that very same convenience that can cause problems for developers, especially when working for large organizations that have a great deal of regulations, such as a bank or government agency.

As a company begins writing for the cloud, developers usually write one-off scripts to tackle security and compliance issues. This may work a few times, but during audits, organizations find that it is increasingly difficult to scale up by doing ad-hoc script functions.

This is where Cloud Custodian really shines. Since its release, the platform has attracted over 300 contributors and broad adoptions within large enterprises, such as Ticketmaster and Verizon media. However, for many developers, the most important aspect of Cloud Custodian is its open-source converts. 

Open source programming and technology has become a significant trend in recent years. Previously, the most popular open-source projects were Linux based operating systems, which not many people used. These days, open-source tech has taken the world by storm and can be seen everywhere from bitcoin and Defi to Cloud computing technology.

Conclusion

Cloud Custodian is a powerful open-source technology that allows users to run several different cloud-based services in a single environment. Unlike other services that claim to offer the same thing, Cloud Custodian is an open-source program and is a testament to the open-source trend emerging in the world of tech and FinOps.

Anyone who wants to find out more about Cloud Custodian can visit the project’s website.

Regina Wheeler is an e-learning consultant at Write my research proposal and Phd Kingdom. She has been involved in a number of projects that have seen her write on topics such as management, marketing, and finance. She also writes for Cheap coursework.

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