One of today’s greatest challenges in an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) managed infrastructure environment is the ability to effectively identify discrepancies as they happen. driftctl catches drift outside of a developer’s infrastructure code, filling in a crucial missing element of a comprehensive DevSecOps toolbox. The acquisition to acquire CloudSkiff now enables the global Snyk team to accelerate adding these enhanced drift detection capabilities to Snyk IaC, while also continuing to encourage and facilitate the open-source development of driftctl.
Empowering development and security teams
The Snyk Developer Security Platform empowers both development and security teams to innovate securely by leveraging cloud-native technologies like containers and IaC. Snyk helps these developers create secure configurations, and with the addition of these new drift detection capabilities, coverage is now expanded to close the infrastructure drift blind spots that can creep in after deployment. Static IaC tests alone cannot detect these post-deployment changes and developers are unable to secure what they cannot detect.
Empowering developers to own and fix these issues is critical as over half of today’s applications include some form of IaC1. driftctl effectively closes these gaps for IaC engineers and immediately extends Snyk IaC’s capabilities in significant ways, including:
- Scanning Cloud Environments: in order to detect differences between the intended configuration represented by IaC, and the actual state; and,
- Identifying Unmanaged Resources: resources that are unmanaged in the IaC code base to determine what then needs to be managed or deleted.
Moreover, the CloudSkiff team brings to Snyk a wealth of domain expertise, having successfully built an open-source tool with an engaged, continually growing community over the course of the last year. The team’s deep expertise promises to further accelerate new Snyk IaC features beyond just drift in 2021 and beyond.
Maintaining driftctl as an open-source tool
Snyk is fully committed to maintaining driftctl as an open-source tool moving forward. The full transparency of the work on driftctl, including live coding and demonstration sessions as well as the community interaction on key issues in GitHub and on Discord will successfully continue as Snyk recognizes that the recent growth of IaC tools has largely been due to the contributions of the active IaC community.
Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk said,
“We recognize the team powering driftctl as the ultimate experts in the widely acknowledged issues associated with infrastructure drift. We’re excited that millions of developers worldwide will now have access to an IaC product that combines these increased infrastructure drift capabilities with the power of the comprehensive Snyk platform. We’re particularly thrilled to welcome the active driftctl community into the Snyk family, and will continue to actively develop driftctl as an open source tool.”
The acquisition of CloudSkiff is Snyk’s fourth since October 2020, following the successful purchases of FossID, Manifold and DeepCode. This latest corporate development comes on the heels of the company’s September 2021 announcements of over $600 million in Series F investment.