Securing GitOps pipelines

This post introduces Khone, an in-house GitOps solution developed by Grab's Coban team to manage infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for streaming infrastructure like Flink pipelines, Kafka topics, and Kafka Connectors. Khone replaces Atlantis by offering enhanced security through custom validation scripts and workflows, a simplified user experience, and adherence to the DRY principle by minimizing boilerplate code. Key features include a three-stage pipeline (Initialization, Terraform, Metric) with detailed security checks like code inspection using python-hcl2, resource validation based on path, and linting. It also implements remote pipeline configuration and script storage in a separate admin repository to prevent tampering, and uses a dedicated dev repository for testing.