FAQ

General

What does Governance Mean?

Governance, or Cloud Governance, on the context of OpenGovernance refers to the rules, policies, and procedures that help organizations manage and optimize cloud services. A Governance Framework provides a structured approach to applying these guidelines across the organization, ensuring compliance, security, and cost-efficiency.

For instance, if your app uses AWS S3 or Google Blob for storing documents, the framework dictates encryption, lifecycle management, and tagging policies to apply. You may also need approval via GitHub or JIRA before production deployment, depending on team requirements.

Governance frameworks optimize costs, reduce waste, enhance security, improve reliability, and ensure compliance. Note: "Governance" and "Cloud Governance" are used interchangeably on our platform.

How can OpenGovernance help me?

OpenGovernance is designed for Engineering, DevOps, and Security teams to simplify their workflows.

Visibility: Consolidates visibility of cloud assets, identities, configurations, repositories, and incidents across more than 50 cloud providers and tools, enhancing management and oversight.

Improve Security: Audit against recognized security frameworks such as CIS, NIST CSF, Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), FedRAMP, and more. Captures evidence and tracks drifts.

Audit for Best Practices, Process Conformance, and Regulatory Compliance: Assesses cloud workloads against the Well-Architected Frameworks to identify reliability gaps in data, network, application, and cloud compliance. Ensures infrastructure alignment with vendor-recommended best practices to boost efficiency, security, and reliability.

What are the key differences between the Community and Enterprise editions?

The Community Edition is open-source, runs on Kubernetes, and includes enterprise-grade features like SSO and SSL support. It has been proven on $100M+ annual cloud spend across AWS and Azure with over 10K users. It's limited to AWS, Azure, and Entra ID (AzureAD).

The Enterprise Edition expands integration support to 50+ tools and platforms, such as GitHub, GitLab, Snyk, and CloudFlare, enabling cross-platform data correlation. It also retains audit history between major upgrades, which are released every six months, and includes exclusive upgrade wizards.

Both Managed and SaaS hosted options are available for the Enterprise Edition, with the Managed option ensuring data remains with the customer.

What is Steampipe and why is it important?

Steampipe is an open-source tool that turns your cloud infrastructure into a queryable database. Use familiar SQL to explore and analyze your cloud environment in real-time. Think of it as a developer-friendly, always up-to-date catalog of everything in your cloud. OpenGovernance takes Steampipe's power further, adding a layer of governance and control. We enable you to save query history, visualize results in dashboards, manage policies across multiple accounts, and collaborate with your team - all within an intuitive UI.

We also extend Steampipe's vendor-agnostic SQL-based language to seamlessly integrate with over 50+ DevOps, Cloud, Kubernetes, Identity Providers, and other platforms and tools. It's like Steampipe, supercharged for security, compliance, and operational excellence.

Installation

What is GitOps and how does it facilitate the installation?

OpenGovernance's installation uses GitOps, a method leveraging Flux CLI and Git to automate the setup of multiple microservices on Kubernetes. This approach automates the setup of our multiple microservices, enhancing security and smooth operation.

GitOps uses Git repository to manage and track all configurations, ensuring no sensitive information is stored in Git. This strategy guarantees a precise and secure installation of OpenGovernance, fully aligned with best practices.

Overview of the Process

Deployment options

Tools

Install Flux CLI