Static Analysis of Infrastructure as Code: a Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews static analysis techniques for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), highlighting current methods, defect types, and platforms to improve security and reliability in IaC deployment.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing static analysis approaches for IaC, identifying research gaps and categorizing defect types and tools.

Findings

Various static analysis techniques are used for IaC.

Defect categories include security and reliability issues.

Tools target multiple IaC platforms.

Abstract

The increasing use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in DevOps leads to benefits in speed and reliability of deployment operation, but extends to infrastructure challenges typical of software systems. IaC scripts can contain defects that result in security and reliability issues in the deployed infrastructure: techniques for detecting and preventing them are needed. We analyze and survey the current state of research in this respect by conducting a literature review on static analysis techniques for IaC. We describe analysis techniques, defect categories and platforms targeted by tools in the literature.