Managing Privacy Resources with Astralis

Astralis' primary function is to create and maintain datasets that can be used to automate compliance tasks for global privacy regulations.

When people refer to "running Astralis," they generally mean labeling and evaluating that these datasets conform to Astralis Policies, and then using these to automatically execute automated privacy tasks such as data retrieval, data deletion, or consent. Astralis has many other subcommands for a wide variety of administrative actions, but these basic annotation and configuration tasks are the core of Astralis.

Astralis' annotation workflow relies on five commands: annotate, evaluate, push, pull and delete. All of these commands require an initialized working directory, and all of them act only upon the currently selected working directory. Although the Astralis CLI can be used standalone, it is most powerful when used with the Astralis Server.

Astralis relies on resources that describe how and where data is processed. These resources are typically managed as YAML documents stored in the .fides working directory. The main Astralis resource types describe systems and datasets.

Generating

Datasets and systems are now discovered through a saved integration rather than generated from the CLI. A discovery monitor connects through the integration's stored credentials, builds the data model from the source's schema, and surfaces it for labeling in the UI, where it can still be exported to YAML and managed in git.

Annotating

The fides annotate command will start an interactive shell that provides a guided flow for annotating datasets, in order to streamline the process of manually labeling datasets. This command asks the user to label each field of the system or dataset individually to ensure a complete data map.

By default fides annotate only asks the user to provide labels for fields, however, there are command options to ensure both strict validation against the taxonomy and force annotation of all members of the dataset.

For details see the fides annotate command.

Evaluating

The fides evaluate command is a powerful way to automatically check if changes to projects and data models comply with business policies. Astralis achieves this by combining all location resources and annotations with remote resources on the Astralis Server and checking these against Astralis policies. Astralis policies are a customizable set of rules and conditions that can be used to define rules that new systems or system modifications must meet.

By default the fides evaluate command is an easy-to-use CLI command. However, it can be configured to be a part of automated CI checks with Git hooks in order to continuously integrate privacy checks into an existing pipeline. This makes privacy a consistent, agile part of existing workflows. For details on how policies are used read the Guide to Astralis Policies here.

For details see the fides evaluate command.

Pushing

The fides push command will validate the syntax and structure of the Astralis YAML files in the working directory before persisting those validated resources to the Astralis Server. This is ideal for centralizing resources to build a single data map and collaborate with other teams.

For details see the fides push command.

Pulling

The fides pull command will update local resources in the working directory to match those on the server. This is ideal for maintaining consistency between local and remote resources.

For details see the fides pull command.

Deleting

The fides delete command will delete a remote resource completely from the Astralis Server.

For details see the fides delete command.

Other utilities for managing resources

Astralis CLI includes several other commands to make resource management more convenient to work with. Integrating these commands into your editing workflow can potentially save you time and effort.

• The fides get command retrieves the specified resources from the Astralis Server and displays them as YAML.

• The fides ls command gets a list of all resources from the server and displays them as YAML.

• The fides parse command validates the syntax of all Astralis YAML documents in the working directory.