Fail open and layer policy is a design principle for infrastructure, which emphasizes building flexible systems with a decoupled policy enforcement la

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2024-11-08 12:30:03

Fail open and layer policy is a design principle for infrastructure, which emphasizes building flexible systems with a decoupled policy enforcement layer constraining usage. For example, building a Dockerfile based deployment system which can accept any Dockerfile, and then adding a validation step which only allows a certain set of base images.

This approach gets even more powerful when applied across a suite of solutions, as it allows you to reduce the flexibility in a particular platform while preserving user flexibility.

Imagine you’re running an “orchestration” team who is responsible for helping engineers at your company deploy and run their software. Your very first offering might be granting teams access to a server or VM. This works well, and is immensely flexible.

As the company you support grows, some of your users will start to ask if you can reduce the burden of managing individual servers for them (especially those running stateless applications). If you love your users, which of course you do, then eventually you find the time to roll out a service orchestration framework, say Kubernetes or Aurora, abstracting your users from individual server failures.