How a simple app resilience test helps you understand your production environment better!
Appranix guarantees any resource, any time, and any region recovery leveraging the cloud-native capabilities to bring back your entire application environment from any downtime — ransomware attacks, bad deployments, cloud misconfigurations, local cloud service failures, entire cloud region failure, or even a natural disaster. It is simple to use with a very intuitive UI. If you have access to your cloud marketplace, you can start with Appranix, and protect and recover your applications in under 5 mins!
In this blog, we will highlight a couple of recent user experiences of a large financial services company using Appranix that brought to light a host of production setup and configuration issues.
Secure and optimize production environments
Appranix continuously reverse-engineers and copies all the cloud configurations in application environments, including the security group rules, IP configurations, dependencies, and also all the application configurations inside your production instance as forever incremental copies.
When you make a copy of your production environment using Appranix, you now have an option and freedom to verify, tweak and try configuration changes to improve security and optimize application performance. You can then reconfigure your production environment with the same configurations.
Organization policy violation identification
A simple resilience testing for DR using Appranix will help you identify if your production environments have any violation of your organization’s security policies. A recent DR test performed by one of our customers exposed the problem of having password authentication enabled in the production environment, which was against the customer’s organization policy that was not checked by their governance tools. There is always an opportunity to identify anomalies or the configuration drifts from what is your desired production environment and what is actually deployed in your production environment.
Chaos engineering is hard but a simple resilience test is easy
Yet another incident that the customer identified with the latest resilience test is to ensure the security settings for enabling or disabling auto-update of software running in their production environment. If the setting is not correct in your production environment, you will be able to notice that the version of software running on your production is different from what is recovered. This exposes the risk that your production environment VM can get a new software/ patch update from AWS automatically without your knowledge on the next VM reboot and your production application may not behave properly with the updated software version.
Document your Application environment
Cloud application environments are complex and dynamic. They are getting more complex and more dynamic every day. It is difficult to track all the moving parts even if you had a methodical approach to deploying your cloud application infrastructures. You can get the infrastructure-as-code or the diagram with a simple download option from Appranix’s Application Environment Time Machine.
Appranix helps document the application environment in more meaningful, simple, and self-explanatory diagrams by capturing all the environment configurations live based on your backup and DR policies. You will be aware of what components existed and what got added and removed by comparing your images that you get from each of the recovery performed by Appranix.
Original Blog Link: https://www.appranix.com/resources/blogs/2021/03/how-a-simple-app-resilience-test-helps-you-understand-your-production-environment-better.html
