Karine DilanyanDiscover how Atmosphere enables secure, fast DevOps on OpenStack with IaC, CI/CD, secrets management, and continuous auditing.
DevOps teams demand speed and agility, but not at the expense of security. With 80% of organizations reporting a cloud security incident in the past year, it’s clear that security can’t be an afterthought. In a private cloud environment built on OpenStack, achieving this balance requires the right tools and practices. Atmosphere OpenStack is designed to give DevOps engineers programmable infrastructure without compromising on security or velocity.
This post explores how Atmosphere embeds security throughout the development lifecycle while supporting fast-paced DevOps workflows on OpenStack.
DevOps Speed with Built-In Security Guardrails
Atmosphere provides the foundational building blocks (compute, storage, networking, identity) of OpenStack in a way that mirrors DevOps operational priorities. From the ground up, it was built around Infrastructure-as-Code principles, enabling teams to declare environments as code, repeat deployments without drift, and manage updates as part of CI/CD workflows. In practice, this means security is not an afterthought – it’s woven into the automation and governance of your cloud.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Policies by Default
Atmosphere’s Identity Service (integrated with Keystone/Keycloak) lets you define fine-grained user roles and project scopes. Each team or pipeline gets only the permissions it needs, reducing risk of unauthorized changes. Automated, policy-driven provisioning enforces security configurations from the moment instances are deployed – developers get infrastructure that’s secure out-of-the-box without extra steps.
Network Isolation and Quotas
Using OpenStack’s multi-tenant model, Atmosphere isolates environments by project (tenant) with dedicated virtual networks, security groups, and resource quotas. Dev, test, and production workloads can run in separate compartments, preventing lateral movement between them and containing any faults or attacks. Teams can move fast in their sandbox while the blast radius remains small.
Secure by Default Services
Key OpenStack services in Atmosphere (compute, storage, Kubernetes, etc.) come with security features enabled. For example, block storage volumes can be encrypted at rest with managed keys, and the integrated Kubernetes service enforces cluster isolation and auto-healing to protect container workloads. These guardrails ensure that even rapid deployments adhere to security best practices automatically.
By providing these baked-in controls, Atmosphere allows DevOps teams to innovate quickly within safe boundaries. Developers can self-service infrastructure and iterate rapidly, while knowing that governance measures (RBAC, network segmentation, encryption, etc.) are continuously in effect.
Next, we’ll dive into practical workflows and tools that Atmosphere supports to enable secure DevOps in each stage of the pipeline.
CI/CD Pipeline Integration with Atmosphere
Atmosphere easily connects OpenStack private cloud resources to your CI/CD pipelines, integrating with tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Argo CD. This lets automation handle infrastructure and releases from code commit to deployment.
- Automated Provisioning: Pipelines can call Atmosphere’s APIs or CLI to create or update resources on demand, such as spinning up a QA environment before tests.
- Ephemeral Test Environments: Launch temporary, production-like environments for each code push. They remain isolated, ensuring test data security, and are removed automatically when no longer needed.
- Blue-Green & Canary Deployments: Provision new instances, switch traffic securely via Atmosphere’s integrated load balancer, and roll back automatically if issues arise.
- Automatic Rollbacks: If a new release fails health checks (via Prometheus/Grafana), pipelines can revert to the last stable state using snapshots or previous deployments.
By embedding these practices into CI/CD, Atmosphere ensures every environment is secure, consistent, and fast to deploy — without slowing the release cycle.
Infrastructure as Code and GitOps for Consistency
With Infrastructure-as-Code adoption hitting 90% of DevOps teams, it’s clear that automation and governance have become essential standards—Atmosphere builds on this by bringing full Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) capabilities to OpenStack, letting you define your entire private cloud — networks, security groups, instances, and Kubernetes clusters — in code. Using tools like Heat templates, Terraform, or Ansible, teams can deploy repeatable, drift-free environments that carry the same secure configurations every time. All changes pass through version control and review, applying the same discipline to infrastructure as to application code.
With GitOps workflows, Atmosphere can continuously apply updates straight from your Git repository. Tools like Argo CD monitor changes and automatically enforce them in the cloud, ensuring there’s always a single source of truth. If someone modifies settings manually, GitOps will revert them to the approved configuration, maintaining compliance. Every change is tracked, giving clear audit trails for security oversight.
By combining IaC and GitOps, Atmosphere delivers environment consistency across development, staging, and production. Templates can be parameterized for different stages but keep identical security controls. This makes it easier to roll out changes quickly, recover from incidents, and maintain a secure posture without sacrificing speed.
Key components of a DevOps-ready cloud architecture with Atmosphere – including multi-tenant isolation, network segmentation, Kubernetes integration, automated CI/CD pipelines, and auto-scaling. Defining infrastructure as code (IaC) and using GitOps workflows ensures that OpenStack environments are consistent and repeatable across dev, staging, and prod, all while being fully automated and auditable.
By leveraging IaC and GitOps, Atmosphere users get the best of both worlds: agility in operations and strong governance. Teams can spin up or modify infrastructure at will through code, but every provisioned resource adheres to the templates and policies in place. This dramatically reduces the chances of ad-hoc, insecure configurations – nothing is a one-off snowflake if it’s all in version control. Moreover, should a misconfiguration slip through, it’s straightforward to pinpoint in code and fix or revert via Git.
Secrets Management and Secure Configuration
In DevOps, mishandling passwords, keys, or certificates can lead to critical security gaps. Atmosphere mitigates this risk with built-in secrets management and secure configuration tools, ensuring sensitive data stays protected throughout automation workflows.
At the core is Barbican Key Management Service (KMS), which encrypts secrets at rest and controls access via RBAC. Pipelines can securely fetch credentials or certificates at runtime instead of hardcoding them, with every access logged for auditing. Secrets can also be injected safely into applications — through cloud-init, Kubernetes Secrets, or external vault integrations — without exposing them in code or configs.
Atmosphere supports Configuration-as-Code with encryption, enabling secure storage of sensitive settings in Git using tools like Ansible Vault or SOPS. Combined with least privilege service accounts in Keystone, automation agents only get the permissions they need, and every API call is traceable. This approach ensures faster deployments never come at the expense of security.
Isolated Testing and Staging Environments
A hallmark of DevOps is having multiple environments (dev, test, staging, production) to rapidly iterate and validate changes. In a private cloud, it’s crucial that these environments are isolated for security, yet easy to create or reset for speed.
Atmosphere, leveraging OpenStack’s multi-tenancy, enables on-demand isolated environments that mirror production without risking it.
Per-Project Isolation
In Atmosphere, you can allocate separate OpenStack projects (tenants) for different stages or teams. Each project has its own networks, compute instances, storage volumes, and even Kubernetes clusters – all completely isolated at the virtual network level. This means you can have a staging project with an identical topology to production, but no chance of overlap or data leakage between them. Network policies (security groups, firewalls) further ensure that staging systems cannot talk to production systems except via controlled interfaces, if at all. Isolation provides security by containment: if a vulnerability is exploited in a test environment, the blast is confined to that project.
Automated Environment Provisioning
Atmosphere supports programmatically creating these projects and populating them with resources. Using Terraform or Ansible, you can define what a “standard test environment” looks like (e.g., a network, 2 web servers, 1 DB server, certain configs) and spin that up in a new project with one command. This is ideal for ephemeral environments used in CI pipelines. For example, for every feature branch, your pipeline could instantiate a new project, deploy the application there, run tests, then delete the project. Atmosphere’s consistency ensures the environment comes up pre-configured with baseline security (hardened images, monitored endpoints) each time. It’s a practical way to embed security early in the development cycle – developers test on production-like setups with all the security controls in place, catching issues before they hit prod.
Controlled Promotion Between Environments
When a release passes tests in staging, Atmosphere makes it easier to promote that to production in a controlled manner. Rather than fiddling with production directly, you can snapshot or export the staging environment’s state (VM images, orchestration templates) and import them into prod. Using Heat or Terraform, treat your staging as a dry-run – once it’s validated, reapply the same IaC scripts to the prod project. This reduces errors during deployment and ensures that the security posture of staging and prod match (no forgotten firewall rules, etc.). Atmosphere’s governance features like usage quotas and network segmentation help here too: they prevent a runaway staging test from consuming resources needed in prod, and they enforce that e.g. test VMs use non-routable networks unless explicitly allowed.
Simulating Chaos Safely
A secure DevOps culture encourages testing failure scenarios (chaos engineering, disaster recovery drills) in non-prod environments. With Atmosphere, you can perform these experiments in isolated projects without affecting users. For instance, you might intentionally take down a server in a staging project to verify auto-healing (which Atmosphere’s Kubernetes clusters will do) or simulate a network outage to see if your monitoring alerts fire. These tests improve resilience and security readiness, and Atmosphere’s isolation ensures you can be bold in testing without jeopardizing real data. The rich telemetry integration (Prometheus, Grafana, etc.) means you have full visibility into these environments to assess impact and adjust configurations, all in a safe sandbox.
By using isolated OpenStack projects and automated environment management, DevOps teams can iterate quickly and confidently. Security is maintained by strong isolation and by using replicas of the production setup for testing, so there are no surprises at release time. Developers enjoy freedom to experiment, while operators sleep well knowing experiments stay in the lab until ready.
Continuous Auditing and Rapid Rollbacks
In fast-paced DevOps, speed is only valuable when paired with visibility and control. Atmosphere equips OpenStack private clouds with integrated auditing, monitoring, and rollback capabilities, ensuring every change is traceable, compliant, and reversible when necessary. These features allow teams to push updates rapidly while maintaining a strong security posture.
Atmosphere delivers:
- Full-stack monitoring & audit trails – Built-in Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki logging capture metrics, logs, and events from all OpenStack components. Every API call, resource creation, and configuration change is tracked through Keystone identity mapping, so you know exactly who made changes and when.
- Pipeline-integrated compliance checks – By embedding OpenStack security scans and config validations into CI/CD pipelines, you can automatically block deployments that violate security baselines (e.g., insecure ports, outdated images).
- Fast rollbacks – Roll back to a previous Infrastructure-as-Code template or Git commit within minutes. For critical workloads, snapshots and backups (Cinder, Kubernetes Velero) provide rapid state restoration.
- Snapshot & backup support – Protect data and workloads with pre-update volume snapshots or cluster state backups, ensuring quick recovery from failed updates.
- Auditable changes – Combine Git history with OpenStack’s audit logs to meet compliance needs, support post-mortems, and enable reproducible fixes.
With Atmosphere, this tight loop — deploy, observe, adjust — becomes second nature. Teams can roll out changes confidently, detect and respond to issues early, and restore stable states quickly without manual firefighting. This balance of velocity and oversight is what makes Atmosphere a secure, DevOps-ready platform for OpenStack private clouds.
Conclusion: Fast, Safe, and Streamlined DevOps on OpenStack
With Atmosphere, DevOps teams get the agility of cloud-native practices and the control of a secure private cloud — without compromise. Built-in automation, CI/CD integration, Infrastructure-as-Code, secrets management, and continuous auditing make it possible to deploy faster while staying compliant and secure.
Security becomes a silent enabler, ensuring every release is policy-driven, monitored, and reversible if needed — so your team focuses on building, not firefighting.
Ready to accelerate DevOps without sacrificing control? Get in touch with VEXXHOST and see Atmosphere in action.