The #1 Barrier to Developer Clouds: The Hidden Cost of Compliance

What Are Developer Clouds

The term "Developer Clouds" informally refers to a category of cloud service providers, including platforms such as Vultr, Linode (Akamai), DigitalOcean, Fly.io, and Render.

In contrast to hyperscale providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Developer Clouds deliver significant advantages, including 30–60% cost savings, faster deployment times, and reduced operational complexity.

For instance, provisioning a Kubernetes cluster on Developer Clouds typically takes 1–2 minutes, compared to 10–20 minutes on hyperscalers. This streamlined focus on core services and ease of use simplifies infrastructure management, enabling development teams to reduce overhead and accelerate workflows.

However, when deploying applications subject to compliance requirements such as SOC 2 or HIPAA, users often encounter unique challenges on these platforms.

How Compliance Works Differently on Developer Clouds

Hyperscalers provide services that are well-recognized by auditors. These platforms offer pre-configured compliance settings, dedicated compliance-centric services such as AWS Config, and extensive documentation. Additionally, numerous resources—including open-source tools, expert guides, and free materials—facilitate compliance. Compliance automation solutions like Vanta and Drata integrate seamlessly with hyperscaler environments, further simplifying audits for both customers and auditors.

In contrast, achieving compliance on Developer Clouds presents significant challenges. Unlike hyperscalers, these platforms often lack dedicated compliance-centric services, have limited support from community-driven tools, and are not well-integrated with compliance automation software. Furthermore, their documentation typically prioritizes functional usage ("how-to" guides) over prescriptive guidance on security and compliance best practices.

As a result, the responsibility for compliance shifts heavily onto engineering and security teams, requiring them to:

• Interpret compliance frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001) in the context of their specific operational environment.

• Map compliance controls to the cloud platform’s configurations, access policies, and logging mechanisms.

• Manually collect and aggregate evidence, including configuration exports, log files, and system screenshots.

• Craft detailed compliance narratives that demonstrate how collected evidence aligns with regulatory requirements.

Without native compliance support, Developer Cloud users must bridge these gaps manually, significantly increasing the time, effort, and expertise required to pass an audit.

Example: Access Control (SOC 2 CC6.1)

Let's compare demonstrating SOC 2 CC6.1 (Access Control) compliance on hyperscalers versus Developer Clouds. This control requires logical access measures (roles, permissions, authentication) to prevent unauthorized access.

On Hyperscalers (AWS/Azure/GCP): Compliance is generally simpler due to robust native features. Key advantages include detailed audit logs (e.g., CloudTrail), mature IAM providing granular control, specific compliance/configuration services (e.g., AWS Config), and extensive documentation often mapping features to controls.

Evidence gathering leverages these capabilities, providing readily available, often auditor-familiar data like IAM reports, detailed logs, and configuration exports accessible via console, CLI, or rich APIs. While manual collection is feasible (though potentially time-consuming), automation tools (like Vanta, SecurFrame, Drata) significantly streamline the process by using these APIs for continuous collection and control mapping.

On Developer Clouds (e.g., Linode/Akamai): Demonstrating compliance requires significantly more manual interpretation and effort. This primarily stems from lacking the extensive native compliance features and broad automation support found on hyperscalers.

Evidence gathering typically involves manually piecing together information from UI exports, screenshots, basic API scripts, and potentially less detailed or standardized logs requiring manual filtering. Because this evidence can be less direct, and auditors may be less familiar with the platform's specifics, writing detailed narratives to clearly explain how these elements meet CC6.1 requirements becomes a critical and time-consuming task.

This heavy reliance on manual collection, interpretation, and justification across all controls constitutes significant "legwork"—consuming considerable engineering time—unless specialized automation tools (like opensecurity) are employed for these specific platforms.

Comparison Summary

Where Compliance Automation Falls Short

Engineering teams need tools that integrate seamlessly into their development workflows. While "shift-left" solutions—such as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scanners—are effective at detecting misconfigurations before deployment, they do not address the critical need for continuous, verifiable evidence from live cloud environments, which is essential for compliance audits.

This challenge is particularly pronounced on Developer Clouds (e.g., DigitalOcean, Fly.io), where diverse APIs and inconsistent native reporting mechanisms complicate real-time evidence collection. Traditional compliance automation platforms (e.g., Vanta, Drata), which are intended to address this need, often fall short for engineers working in these environments.

The core issue lies in design philosophy —these platforms were built with an audit-first rather than a developer-first mindset. Their workflows are often rigid and disruptive, making integration impractical for engineering teams.

This creates a major gap: preventative tools don’t capture live audit evidence, and audit-focused tools are impractical for engineers and often incompatible with their cloud platforms. As a result, teams are forced into inefficient and unsustainable compromises:

• Manual evidence gathering—a tedious, error-prone process that increases audit complexity.

• Custom-built compliance tooling—expensive to maintain and fragile in the face of evolving cloud APIs.

• Increased audit risk—jeopardizing security and regulatory adherence.

Each of these options introduces unnecessary compliance "toil"—diverting valuable engineering resources from innovation and eroding the very benefits that make Developer Clouds attractive in the first place: speed, simplicity, and cost efficiency. Addressing this gap requires compliance solutions that are developer-centric, seamlessly integrated, and capable of real-time evidence collection across diverse cloud environments.

A New Approach to Compliance

Given the challenges of compliance on Developer Clouds, how can teams ensure audit readiness without compromising development velocity? Purpose-built tooling designed for these environments can provide a crucial solution.

opensecurity is an open-source project designed to automate compliance evidence collection and management across Developer Cloud platforms. It enables teams to move fast while staying compliant by eliminating manual audit burdens and integrating seamlessly into existing workflows.

How opensecurity Solves Compliance Challenges

• Deep Visibility: Directly integrates with Developer Cloud APIs (e.g., DigitalOcean, Linode, Fly.io, Render) to capture real-time configurations, logs, and settings for accurate verification—eliminating guesswork.

• Customizable Compliance Controls: Define compliance rules using simple SQL, eliminating the need for complex custom scripts. Compliance policies can be managed as code within Git, ensuring transparency and version control.

• Automated Evidence Collection: Gathers compliance evidence automatically based on predefined controls, removing the need for screenshots, manual log exports, and spreadsheets—freeing engineers from compliance toil.

• Open-Source Transparency: Full visibility into how compliance checks are performed. Open-source development allows teams to extend functionality and build integrations faster without waiting for vendor support.

• Shift-Left Compliance: Seamlessly integrates into CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to catch compliance issues early, remediate quickly, and maintain audit readiness without disrupting development velocity.

By integrating compliance seamlessly into fast, cost-effective Developer Clouds, teams can scale efficiently while meeting audit requirements.

Get started in under 3 minutes with just three commands:
👉https://docs.opensecurity.sh/

---

Notes on Vendor Support: Provider support constantly evolves. As of March 26, 2025, ~2:00 PM PDT, Vanta lacked direct support for Vultr/Fly.io with limited DO/Render coverage; while Drata has no support for Linode/Vultr/Fly.io. Unlike for GitHub and AWS support, exact resource coverage is not published.