Latest news with #YAML
Arabian Post
6 days ago
- Arabian Post
Webclei Emerges as a Game-Changer in Free Web Security Scanning
Webclei, a free online web vulnerability scanner, is gaining traction among cybersecurity professionals and developers for its robust capabilities in identifying security flaws in websites and web applications. Unlike many free tools that offer limited functionality, Webclei provides comprehensive scanning features typically found in premium solutions. At its core, Webclei operates on a template-based system written in YAML, allowing it to systematically test websites against a wide array of known security issues. These templates are community-maintained and regularly updated, ensuring the scanner remains effective against emerging threats. The tool supports multiple protocols, including HTTP, DNS, and TCP, making it versatile for various security testing scenarios. One of Webclei's standout features is its concurrent execution capability, enabling it to perform multiple checks simultaneously. This optimization significantly reduces scanning time without compromising accuracy. Users can initiate a scan by simply entering their website URL, selecting specific template categories if desired, and choosing the severity levels of vulnerabilities they wish to detect. The scanner then provides detailed results, categorizing findings by severity—Critical, High, Medium, Low, and Informational. ADVERTISEMENT In practical applications, Webclei has demonstrated its efficacy. For instance, a scan conducted on a government website revealed 31 vulnerabilities, including six medium-severity issues and 25 informational findings. Notably, the scan identified several Roundcube log disclosure vulnerabilities, which could potentially expose sensitive email server information, and missing security headers, highlighting areas for security enhancement. Webclei excels in detecting a range of common vulnerabilities, such as missing security headers, SSL/TLS configuration issues, information disclosure, cross-site scripting , SQL injection flaws, and server misconfigurations. Its ability to identify these issues makes it a valuable tool for website owners seeking to bolster their security posture without incurring significant costs. While Webclei offers substantial benefits, users must exercise caution and adhere to legal and ethical standards. The tool should only be used to scan websites that the user owns or has explicit permission to test. Unauthorized scanning of third-party websites can lead to legal repercussions. Additionally, users are advised to respect rate limits to avoid overwhelming servers and to follow responsible disclosure practices when vulnerabilities are discovered. In comparison to other vulnerability scanners, Webclei holds its own. Paid solutions like Nessus or Qualys offer more extensive features but may be excessive for small to medium-sized websites. Other free tools, such as OWASP ZAP, require installation and a certain level of technical knowledge, whereas Webclei operates directly in the browser with no setup required. Manual security testing, while thorough, is time-consuming, and Webclei automates much of this process, allowing users to focus on more complex security analyses. For users seeking to integrate Webclei into their security workflows, the tool offers advanced techniques, including template filtering to focus on specific vulnerability types, custom severity filtering, and regular monitoring to catch new vulnerabilities as websites evolve. By incorporating Webclei into development and deployment processes, organizations can proactively identify and address security issues, enhancing their overall cybersecurity resilience.
Techday NZ
07-05-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Pulumi launches IDP to speed secure cloud infrastructure delivery
Pulumi has introduced Pulumi IDP, a new internal developer platform designed to accelerate cloud infrastructure delivery for organisations. Pulumi IDP is built on the company's open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) technology and caters to organisations seeking to deliver cloud infrastructure at scale. According to Pulumi, the product allows engineering teams to move from initial ideas to cloud deployment within minutes, while embedding security, compliance, and organisational controls into the process. The company stated that Pulumi IDP has been developed based on insights from a customer base of over 3,500 organisations and 350,000 users. Many customers have independently built internal developer platforms, leveraging Pulumi's IaC platform. Pulumi IDP aims to consolidate best practices from these implementations into a single, complete platform for software delivery with built-in security and governance. James Forcier, Staff Software Engineer at CLEAR, commented on the platform's development, saying, "We've spent a lot of time building our internal developer platform. We moved from a lower-level Terraform and HCL-based interface to Pulumi, letting us use a custom, higher-level, and much simpler-to-use YAML schema we've defined. We've made cloud infrastructure really easy to use for our developers." Gartner has predicted that 80% of large organisations will adopt internal developer platforms in the coming two years. Pulumi IDP seeks to balance a flexible approach that enables developer self-service with guardrails and structure provided by platform teams. The platform allows teams to codify and enforce organisational best practices, publishing reusable infrastructure patterns as components, templates, and policies in a private organisation registry. This registry supports infrastructure definitions in TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, or YAML, and includes features such as built-in documentation, search, semantic versioning, and usage tracking. Developers, data scientists, and other users can use Pulumi IDP to provision and manage cloud infrastructure through multiple interfaces: a no-code user interface, low-code YAML-based CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code in their preferred language, or via a REST API. Projects can be grouped into 'Services', which serve as logical containers for infrastructure, configuration, secrets, documentation, and observability dashboards. Example use cases for Services include web applications, microservices, Jupyter notebooks, and data pipelines. Pulumi IDP also addresses ongoing operational needs, supporting activities such as drift and policy detection, remediation of non-compliant infrastructure, auditing of outdated components, and change management during version upgrades. The platform features approval workflows to maintain organisational oversight and a new visual import tool for onboarding existing infrastructure into Pulumi management. An advanced identity and access management system underpins Pulumi IDP, providing least-privilege access via custom roles, permissions, fine-grained access controls, and integration with SAML/SSO identity providers. These security features extend Pulumi's existing enterprise security foundation to support compliance requirements. Pulumi IDP is available both as a managed SaaS offering and a self-hosted solution for organisations with complex compliance needs. It integrates with other Pulumi enterprise capabilities including Pulumi Copilot for AI-driven infrastructure management, Pulumi Deployments for workflow automation, Pulumi CrossGuard for policy enforcement, alongside a unified REST API and extensible data model. Joe Duffy, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pulumi, outlined the platform's value proposition: "CTOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders tell us that the pace of innovation is faster than ever. To succeed, developers must move fast – without breaking things. Pulumi IDP is the cloud infrastructure platform modern teams have been asking for: infrastructure-first, multi-cloud, immensely powerful and flexible, with built-in security and full visibility and controls. It turns the cloud into a competitive advantage." Supporting perspectives from industry partners reflect the importance of visibility and standard workflows across internal developer platforms. Zachary Cook, Senior Manager of DevOps at Modivcare, remarked, "By integrating Pulumi Policy as Code with Insights Account Scanning and our developer portal, we're achieving the holy grail for Platform Engineering: instant visibility and governance over legacy infrastructure that isn't yet defined in IaC, while also accelerating our path to production for new cloud-native projects." Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer at Docker, highlighted synergies between the companies: "Docker makes software supply chains more secure by standardising build, packaging, and shipping containerised applications - core to any modern internal developer platform. Pulumi complements this by enabling platform teams to define secure, reusable infrastructure patterns. Golden paths are incredibly important to our customers, and we're excited that Pulumi makes it easier to create and adopt them. Together, Docker and Pulumi help teams streamline developer workflows and accelerate delivery from code to cloud." Pulumi IDP is now in public preview and is free to use for Pulumi customers and community members. General availability and additional enterprise pricing are expected later in the year.
India.com
05-05-2025
- Business
- India.com
Vijaya Bhaskara Rao Builds Clouds that Speak through Silence
Vijaya Bhaskara Vijaya Bhaskara Rao measures cloud-transformation success by the silences it produces: incidents that never happen, critical bridges that stay empty, and product teams that focus on features instead of firefighting. Over a sixteen-year journey, he has made that quiet reliability his signature. His core formula—automate every repeatable task, expose telemetry from the first sprint, and embed rollback logic in the initial commit—proved itself when he stabilized complex WebSphere estates for a major North-American insurer. After documenting dependencies, scripting predictable build steps, and rehearsing fail-over drills, mean response time dropped by a quarter and critical incidents virtually disappeared. What seemed remarkable to observers became the opening chapter of a playbook Vijaya now applies to financial services, global development programs, and healthcare systems alike. He begins each engagement with an 'evidence sweep': CPU saturation curves, queue depths, garbage-collection pauses, and patch-level drift across hybrid estates. These metrics are codified into Terraform and Ansible so the baseline can be reproduced in minutes. With observability, security, and rollback traveling alongside business logic, inevitable surprises manifest as clear, actionable signals rather than cryptic stack traces. As deployments shift from monoliths to containers, Vijaya's guard-rails move seamlessly—blue-green templates, health probes, and admission-controller policies embed operational wisdom into every YAML file. 'My experience of implementing large-scale container platforms has taught me that reliability is engineered long before the first pod starts. Clear policies and consistent observability make scaling a routine, not a rescue,' he notes. The outcome is unambiguous: change-failure rates decline, audit findings shrink, and infrastructure spending ties directly to product velocity rather than emergency overtime. Foundations of Reliability Vijaya's respect for first principles was forged during nights dissecting heap dumps and SSL handshakes. Those sessions revealed that most outages begin as faint anomalies: a cache miss that stretches a response by fractions of a millisecond, or a thread pool that never fully drains after a processing surge. By converting such weak signals into concrete metrics, he transforms intuition into automation. At the insurer mentioned above, TLS configuration, queue-depth thresholds, and JVM parameters became version-controlled artifacts. Each pull request triggered quality-gates that validated performance budgets and encryption posture; the same dashboards satisfied security analysts and auditors, removing the traditional divide between development and compliance. Modernization projects follow a similarly deliberate rhythm. Before a workload is containerized, Vijaya ' characterizes ' it over several release cycles—capturing thread-dump signatures, database fan-in patterns, and latency histograms. Migration scripts appear only after this evidence review, unfolding in incremental stages that conclude with blue-green cutovers. Operational knowledge, thus embedded, allows a rollback to become a simple label switch rather than a high-stress intervention. 'Over decades spent refining middleware foundations, I learned that guard-rails widen roads instead of narrowing them. When baselines are peer-reviewed code, freedom and confidence scale together,' he reflects. Governance follows the same pattern of frictionless enforcement. Policy-as-code engines intercept non-compliant images long before production, yet developers self-serve fixes by updating the very manifests that failed validation. Vijaya insists that every failure path educate rather than punish; the platform is largely invisible until it must speak, and then it does so in the objective language of actionable telemetry. Automating Trust at Enterprise Scale A premier US payments network provided a definitive test of Vijaya's rigor: 120 interdependent services required cloud modernization under intense regulatory oversight. He began not with architecture diagrams but with a Terraform module encapsulating segmentation rules, encryption defaults, and cost-allocation tags. From that seed grew a disciplined ecosystem: infrastructure changes entered exclusively by Git pull requests, SonarQube gates enforced code hygiene, and AppDynamics fed live performance heat maps directly into sprint retrospectives. Within half a year, deployment lead-time fell from multiple release cycles to a single iteration, while change-failure rate dropped nearly forty percent—figures confirmed by the organization's risk committee. Central to this acceleration is Vijaya's 'deployment health score,' a composite index blending test coverage, latency budgets, and vulnerability scan results. Displayed simultaneously on engineering monitors and executive dashboards, the score transforms disagreements into data-driven decisions. Security specialists contribute policy updates through the same Git workflow as feature developers; auditors shift from periodic freezes to perpetual attestation; release managers realize that postponement adds no safety once the score is green. 'Lessons accumulated while modernizing regulated platforms showed me that transparency is the most effective compliance strategy. Shared metrics replace theatrical risk meetings with routine, evidence-based planning,' Vijaya explains. Guard-rails, however, remain collaborative. Pipeline templates are open to revision, rollback hooks publish human-readable remediation steps, and every auto-revert tag includes guidance for re-promotion after a fix. This shared stewardship rewires organizational culture: developers treat latency anomalies as solvable puzzles rather than finger-pointing episodes, and executives link infrastructure budgets to observable product gains instead of unverified assurances. Trust becomes the platform's most scalable feature. Cultivating Continuous Improvement Technical discipline sustains performance metrics; human dynamics sustain progress. Vijaya therefore embeds psychological safety into the delivery process. Fortnightly 'architecture cafés' invite junior engineers to present anomalies such as packet-loss blips or thread-starvation events while senior architects practice active listening. Whiteboard sessions conclude with action items that feed directly into the next sprint backlog. Six months into one such program, engagement surveys showed a double-digit rise in employees who felt comfortable admitting mistakes—a signal matched by an equally strong uptick in proactive pull requests focused on operational resilience. Incident management exhibits the same empathy-infused structure. Sev-1 bridges open with a timeline of facts, hypotheses, and next experiments. Annotated post-mortems become searchable artifacts feeding capacity-planning models and onboarding curricula. Rotating on-call ownership broadens domain knowledge, while recognition of small wins—an extra unit test here, a tighter readiness probe there—compounds into more resilient code bases. As developers internalize a culture where evidence beats ego, release cadence accelerates without sacrificing stability. Budget committees notice the shift: automation investments correlate with lower rework costs and higher customer satisfaction scores. Retention charts improve as night-time alerts decline, validating Vijaya's belief that robust platforms and healthy teams reinforce one another rather than compete for attention. Engineering for an AI-Powered Landscape With guard-rails and culture firmly in place, Vijaya now pursues predictive operations. He pilots large-language-model prompts that transform plain-language governance—' encrypt all customer data in transit and at rest '—into Open Policy Agent rules automatically inserted into CI pipelines. Initial results compress compliance rollout from several iterations to a handful of days and identify configuration drift within hours. Parallel telemetry pipelines feed multivariate anomaly detectors that correlate Kubernetes events, database latencies, and CI telemetry. Pilot clusters have already flagged the majority of high-severity incidents at least two hours early, granting engineers the luxury of graceful remediation instead of crisis intervention. Reinforcement agents further refine autoscaling thresholds based on historic diurnal patterns, trimming compute expense while maintaining latency objectives. Chat-ops bots assemble incident updates by summarizing Grafana traces, linking them to the pull requests that introduced regressions, and proposing rollbacks with a single click. Vijaya cautions that algorithms amplify existing discipline rather than substitute for it, yet within ecosystems where every log line and policy rule is version-controlled, AI becomes a force multiplier of human insight. His roadmap envisions predictive insights as routine, compliance expressed conversationally, and engineering creativity redirected toward higher-order abstractions such as user experience and domain modelling. By preserving clean seams—data, policy, and remediation exposed as stable APIs—Vijaya ensures that machine reasoning integrates naturally instead of via brittle glue code. A Vision Anchored in Quiet Excellence Across continents and industries, Vijaya's blueprint remains consistent: automate the obvious, illuminate the unknown, and keep users blissfully unaware of the machinery beneath. The platforms he architects are praised not for flash but for the silence they foster—silence that signals predictability. Operational expenditures track downward because waste is measurable and pruned; release trains accelerate because guard-rails eliminate hesitation; auditors close findings swiftly because evidence is innate, not after-the-fact. A ' quiet platform,' in Vijaya's lexicon, does not hide problems—it surfaces only the right ones to the right people at the right moment. As enterprises accelerate toward an AI-shaped horizon, Vijaya's principle—evidence first, empathy always—offers a pragmatic compass. His career demonstrates that resilience and velocity are not opposing endpoints but co-products of disciplined automation and human-centric culture. By weaving those values into every line of code and every team ritual, Vijaya Bhaskara Rao ensures that the future of cloud will continue to speak in a language of calm, measurable confidence
