PIACERE

Programming trustworthy Infrastructure As Code in a sEcuRE framework

PROJECT TYPE

Horizon 2020

DURATION

01. 12. 2020 - 30. 11. 2023

PROJECT MANAGER AT XLAB

Dr. Matija Cankar
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101000162.

Effectively managing increasingly complex IT infrastructure is challenging. How to increase the speed, quality and security of operations while lowering costs? Automation, cloud and software-defined networking play a big part in the process.

The role of software in infrastructure management has grown significantly in the last few years, as software developers joined forces with infrastructure operators to shorten the development life cycle and provide continuous delivery (DevOps). Infrastructure as a code (IaC) programmatically defines the infrastructure, application deployment and management, enabling automation of repeatable tasks, significantly saving time and enabling the code to be reused or adapted whenever needed. The big challenge to be solved is trust - trust into the automation, IaC and the so-deployed infrastructure and automation.

Although the market is already offering different set of infrastructure automation tools and practices, the problem with existing solutions is there is no single tool to manage the whole lifecycle of infrastructure as code, nor they address all trustworthiness and security aspects throughout the lifecycle.

PIACERE works on an integrated set of infrastructure automation tools by developing the tools, techniques and methods, that allow organisations to develop and operate IaC through DevOps practices exactly the way they would do with traditional code, with the additional focus on security - DevSecOps. This leads to increased productivity of operations, security, overall quality and reliability of deployed infrastructure.

XLAB’s role

With extensive expertise in IaC and security, XLAB crucially contributes to the definition and development of the PIACERE platform by leading activities related to trustworthiness and security of IaC. XLAB implements the platform’s security inspection components, security features to the IaC testing environment and contribute to the IaC deployment orchestration, as well as runtime security monitoring mechanisms.