Your DevOps team might be practicing ClickOps without even realizing it causing inefficiencies, misconfigurations, and cost sprawl.
Manual, UI-based cloud management processes that bypass Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles—or worse, in the absence of IaC—lack the rigor to manage complex cloud environments. These ClickOps processes slow down deployments, increase errors, create compliance risks, impede scaling, decrease reliability of the infrastructure, and lead to cost sprawl.
By contrast, transitioning to an automated IaC-based system can help identify then eliminate ClickOps while increasing efficiency and the business value of an organization’s cloud infrastructure.
What is ClickOps?
ClickOps is the term of art used to describe instances or ongoing practices where cloud infrastructure engineers—often members of the DevOps team—make manual changes to the infrastructure (large and small) via their computer. They do this by clicking into the company’s portal to create, edit, or delete resources.
Depending on the circumstances and context, engineers (and others) may view ClickOps as a simpler change method because it is less code-intensive and more accessible. This is especially true for users with access but who lack expertise in infrastructure provisioning or application deployments. Beyond convenience or lack of technical skill, other common instances where team members may choose ClickOps:
- They lack automation tools or system skills,
- While in the midst of firefighting urgent issues,
- Or during the changeover of a merger or other types of reorganizations.
Examples include:
- Making infrastructure changes via the AWS Management Console,
- Altering security groups in the cloud platform.
- And any other occurrence of manual provisioning rather than an IaC automation tool such as Terraform.
To be a bit more specific, a cloud DevOps engineer logs into the cloud provider’s UI to manually select the configuration of a new virtual machine or allocates new storage space. Similarly, a cloud security engineer manually sets up or makes a change to a security group while another DevOps engineer in a separate location makes a similar change to establish a new role and related permissions.
When one considers the scope of operations to manage a diverse and expanding cloud environment, the range of possibilities for DevOps to occur is almost limitless.
Six ClickOps Hidden Risks
As you may have noticed from the examples above, with individual engineers making small or large manual changes to the infrastructure, the risk of unintended outcomes is considerable. Let’s take a look at some examples:
1) Productivity Drain
Manual work slows down deployments and management tasks.
Consider the employee who wants to manually create a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. This may seem convenient and even preferable to managers. However, what if they need to create 20, 30, or even 100 instances? Or consider the productivity drift when you have a diverse array of engineers making ClickOps changes for a range of needs across a complex cloud environment.
Each of these employees must work across multiple clouds and sift through cloud provider documentation to complete these tasks. Additionally, employees may have to do some of this work via generate-and-test due to UI updates or uncaptured documentation revisions. And the organization loses this knowledge acquired by significant effort on new employees because the experienced employee leaves the company or team.
2) Lack of Repeatability
There is no audit trail or version control because in manual ClickOps environments or discreet instances it is difficult to maintain a solid ‘paper trail’ of who did what when. This opaqueness can also lead to confusion and complications, especially when trying to firefight an urgent issue.
3) Increased Human Errors
As the above implies, ClickOps leads to misconfigurations. Human error is always possible—perhaps probable—even among the most experienced engineers and these errors can manifest themselves in a cloud architecture. These errors can cause the loss strategic performance benefits, downtime, and constant bug hunting or even disaster recovery efforts.
4) Compliance and Security Risks
The chaotic environment that ClickOps potentially create makes it harder to meet security policies and goals. For example, ClickOps may bypass organizational security controls or may not undergo the same review and validation processes as those within an IaC regime.
5) Drift from IaC
Even organizations well along the IaC journey with an automated Terraform solution may still have ClickOps occur causing configuration drift, breaking automation pipelines, and other challenges. The more ClickOps the likelier the cloud infrastructure can diverge from its preferred state.
6) Cost Sprawl:
ClickOps has the potential for profound cost implications due to:
- Burdens of manual processes,
- Need for repetitive tasks,
- Lack of automation,
- Inconsistent configurations,
- Scaling challenges,
- Increased risk and errors,
- Bug hunting,
- And rolling back changes if needed.
How to Identify ClickOps in Your DevOps Team
The most obvious is that the company’s engineers rely on ClickOps as the default management process for provisioning and governing cloud resources. They do this because they have not adopted IaC with an automated Terraform-aligned solution.
However, there are less obvious instances. For example, after a lift-and-shift to the cloud as the result of a merger or acquisition, engineers make some ClickOps changes because they seem small, convenient, and harmless. These then go unnoticed until the cloud infrastructure begins to go sideways.
Other clues include:
- Engineers frequently use cloud consoles instead of an automated solution.
- Frequent configuration drift issues.
- Lack of version control or automation in infrastructure changes.
- Increased time spent on troubleshooting misconfigurations.
- Compliance teams struggle to track infrastructure changes (who did this, when, and why?).
Five Best Practices to Transition from ClickOps to Automation
ClickOps and their related risks and challenges do not have to be a fact of life. The following offers a practical high-level guide:
Adopt Infrastructure as Code:
With Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation you can define and manage resources effectively and efficiently. Deployments and other changes are automated and performed according to a defined set of security and management policies. Adjustments, such as updating resources, are a matter of updating parameters and initiating the deployment pipeline.
Further, these automation tools ensure there is standardization, consistency, repeatability, dependencies management, collaboration, scalability, and version control.
Enforce GitOps (single source of truth) & Version Control:
First, store all IaC code in a version control system such as Git to track changes, collaborate, and rollback changes if needed.
Second, all infrastructure changes as a matter of policy and governance must go through Git Pull Requests where the Git system captures and merges proposed changes throughout the DevOps team to facilitate a collaborative code review and discussion before integrating the changes.
Implement Guardrails:
Use policy-as-code tools like ControlMonkey Terraform CI/CD, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Sentinel, or AWS Config to consistently apply rules across all cloud platforms to prevent gaps or conflicting standards. These tools can find issues such as unused or underutilized assets, ghost assets, and ensure that organizations do not deploy non-compliant resources.
For example, ControlMonkey Terraform CI/CD Required Tag control policy enables an organization to create a rule that all resources have specific tag keys and tag values. Therefore, if a proposed change contains a resource without these tags, ControlMonkey’s CI solution will block it.
Allowed Regions control policy empowers an organization to define allowed regions in which an employee could spin up (quickly activated) a resource. If an employee attempts to spin up a resource in a non-allowed region, the allowed regions control policy will block it.
Automate Drift Detection:
Drift refers to discrepancies between the organization’s intended state of its infrastructure as defined by its IaC configuration and the actual state of the deployed resources. This can occur as organizations scale their infrastructure and/or have a complicated cloud environment they are trying to manage via manual or partially automated processes, with conflicting tools, or external dependencies.
Automation helps teams identify and tackle discrepancies to bolster security, compliance, functionality, and reliability. These capabilities help the organization align its intended state of the infrastructure to its actual state. For example, ControlMonkey’s Drift Detection algorithm performs regular checks to detect infrastructure drifts and prioritizes them based on severity and source.
Upskill Engineers:
Simply stated, be persistent in training the organization’s teams on automation-first approaches to eliminate ClickOps practices at their potential source.
The ClickOps Bottom Line
ClickOps is a silent productivity killer that is causing cost sprawl, introduces risk and compliance issues, and undermines the ability of the infrastructure as a strategic value creation center.
Therefore, it is incumbent upon leaders to take a proactive stance by implementing IaC and automation practices to eliminate the practice of and impacts of ClickOps. So, if you suspect that ClickOps is undermining the value of your cloud infrastructure, creating inefficiencies, and negatively impacting costs, audit the organization’s workflows today and take the first step toward true cloud automation. Ready to fight ClickOps and Drifts? Feel like your infrastructure need help to scale it management? Book a demo with ControlMonkey today to see how our platform can streamline your Terraform workflows.
📚 Learn more about leveraging aws cloudtrail to fight clickops
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What is ClickOps?
A: ClickOps is when engineers manually manage cloud resources through a web interface instead of using code.
Q: Why is ClickOps a problem?
A: It slows things down, increases errors, and makes it harder to track changes. It also causes compliance issues and drives up cloud costs.
Q: How can I tell if my team uses ClickOps?
A: Look for frequent use of cloud consoles, missing version control, repeated misconfigurations, and unclear change history.
Q: Does ClickOps increase cloud costs?
A: Yes. Manual processes often lead to unused resources, repeated work, and misconfigurations that waste money.
Q: What stops ClickOps?
A: IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and AWS CloudFormation, along with automation platforms like ControlMonkey, can help enforce policies, detect drift, and manage infrastructure efficiently and securely.
Q: How is IaC better than ClickOps?
A: IaC is reliable, repeatable, and trackable. ClickOps is manual, inconsistent, and risky.
