So today I decided to figure out this thing called Forseti. Heard people tossin' the name around, sounded like some kinda Norse god or somethin’, but turns out it's a tool for keeping your cloud stuff in check. Right up my alley, since I'm always messing around in my cloud account.
The Head-Scratching Setup
First step? Just tryin' to get the dang thing installed. Went straight to the official docs. Holy moly, walls of text. Scrolled past the fancy diagrams and background fluff, hunting for actual steps. Found some commands, copied ‘em into my terminal window. Hit enter... boom. Permission denied. Of course.
Spent like an hour chasing down why. Needed some specific IAM roles on my cloud account – basically fancy permissions so Forseti could peek at my cloud setup. Added a “Security Reviewer” role or whatever it was called. Ran the command again... this time it started spinnin’ its wheels. Seemed promising! Went to grab coffee. Came back... still running. Checked my cloud dashboard? Boom. A couple new VM instances popped up, along with a database. Okay, so Forseti installs its own little spy network inside your cloud. Makes sense.
The "Now What?" Moment
Installation done! Felt good, like leveling up in a game. Opened the docs again. How do I actually use this thing? The docs went on about "scanners" and "inventory" and "policies." Honestly felt overwhelmed.
- Inventory: First thing Forseti does after install? It grabs a giant list of EVERYTHING in your cloud account – buckets, firewalls, VMs, the whole kitchen sink. Kinda like a supercharged cloud explorer tool.
- Scanners: This is the cool bit. These run on that inventory list, hunting for problems. Like a detective squad. Each scanner looks for one specific type of screw-up:
- IAP Scanner: Checks who can jump onto your VMs directly. Don't want just anyone ssh-ing in!
- Bucket ACL Scanner: Looks at who can access your storage buckets. Made public by accident? Big no-no!
- Firewall Scanner: Checks your firewall rules. Like, did someone leave a port wide open to the entire internet? Oops!
Figurin' out how to run these scanners wasn't super obvious. Had to ssh into the Forseti VM. Felt kinda hacker-ish. Found the command: forseti scanner run. Hit enter. It whirred for a while. Felt... anticlimactic.
Finding the Treasure (The Violations!)
Where are the results? Oh yeah, it dumps everything into that database it made. Needed to connect to it. More terminal magic. Ran a query that felt like I was summoning a demon: select from violations_v2 limit 10;
Blammo! A list popped up. First violation? Firewall rule allowing access from 0.0.0.0/0 (that's the whole internet!) to port 22 (ssh!) on some test VM I forgot about months ago. My jaw dropped. Whoops! That’s like leaving your front door wide open with a neon sign saying "Rob me!" Forseti caught it! Immediate sense of relief mixed with sheer panic. Quickly logged into my cloud console and nuked that rule.
Kept scrolling the results. Found a storage bucket I thought was private, but its permissions were messed up. Fixed that too. Forseti basically pointed directly at my security blind spots. Powerful feeling.
Making it Mine (Sort Of)
Default rules are good, but I wanted to tailor it. Forseti uses this thing called "Config Validator" with rules written in a language called Rego. Sounds fancy? It kinda is. My eyes glazed over initially.
Copied an example rule file instead of starting from scratch. Wanted Forseti to yell if any VM wasn't using a disk encryption key. Found a sample, tried tweaking the path names to match my project stuff. Messed up the formatting. Forseti threw errors like "INVALID POLICY." Took a few tries copy-pasting and adjusting quotes.
Finally got my custom rule loaded. Ran the scanner again. Waited... boom! Violation found: one of my dev VMs wasn’t encrypted. Exactly what I was trying to catch. Success!
The "Daily Grind" Part
Manually running scanners is for chumps. Wanted automation. Forseti’s VM comes with cron jobs out of the box, running the inventory and scanners automatically on a schedule (daily by default). Easy win. The data piles up in the database. Learned how to point a kinda clunky Forseti Dashboard at the DB to see violation counts over time – basic but helpful.
Wrapping Up the Brain Dump
So, Forseti? It’s like having a persistent security guard for your cloud stuff, constantly patrolling and writing tickets for violations. Getting it stood up was the toughest part – wrestling with permissions and docs. But once it's humming?
- It inventories all your cloud junk automatically.
- Its built-in scanners catch common dumb mistakes (like public buckets or open firewalls).
- You can (with some effort) add your own custom rules to check for specific things you care about.
- It runs daily checks without you lifting a finger.
Yeah, there’s a learning curve. Yeah, the policy writing felt awkward. But finding that wide-open firewall rule? That alone was worth the setup headache. Definitely keeping it running. Need that extra pair of eyes on my cloud mess.
