Integrating Observability, DevSecOps, and Policy-as-Code for Enterprise Cloud Reliability

Abstract

Modern enterprise cloud infrastructures need to be able to deliver software quickly, remain operationally resilient and follow strict regulatory requirements. Through traditional operations, observability, security and governance are typically treated as separate processes, which leads to longer Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and greater configuration drift in the systems. In this paper, we describe a unified closed loop governance framework that provides continuous observability telemetry and supports integrated automated DevSecOps pipelines with declarative Policy-as-Code (PaC) engines. Using the Open Policy Agent (OPA) and OpenTelemetry combined with standard metrics collection based on Prometheus, our architecture dynamically assesses the state of runtime cloud clusters and continuous deployment pipelines against a version controlled compliance corpus. To mathematically validate this closed loop structure, we provide a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) model representing the degradation of cloud infrastructures and develop a Repair Rate Optimization (RRO) methodology using uniformization and gradient ascent. Results from both empirical and analytical evaluations show that the execution of policy validated autonomous remediation can reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) by as much as 67%, prevent an infinite loop of remediation, and provide greater than 92% compliance with rigid regulatory standards, such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).