Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • The Changing Nature of Data

    Are addresses sensitive or private information? It’s a good question to ask since many of us have address data in our databases. I asked this recently at a SQL in the City event and the room was split. I come down on the side of “no”, for addresses in and of themselves. After all, the domain of addresses is known. It’s public information in most every country.

    A few people pointed out that while the address isn’t private data, when it’s linked to a particular person, it is private. It’s not the address, but the linkage. To me this should give data modelers pause when trying to set up a schema, whether set in an RDBMS or a schema on read in some other type of data store. Separating the user from the address, and having a link that doesn’t necessarily disclose private information can reduce the surface area of sensitive data in your system.

    A second question: have you ever worried about your name being on a door or mailbox? I know some people in larger cities have, but that might be a minority. As I’ve visited friends, a name is often valuable to see on a mailbox, especially in my rural area where houses aren’t very visible from a road. That might change, or need to change. An article in the Washington Post notes that in Vienna names are being replaced with numbers. The linkage to an actual person is being removed in response to a complaint. It this overkill? I don’t know, but it is worth thinking about.

    Google Street View and similar services might be affected. The service blurs faces, but it might need to start blurring addresses or even houses. I’m not sure I think that the images are problematic from a privacy perspective, but I also know that the ability to harvest data remotely and create linkages occurs at a scale and with a creativity that I would never have imagined.

    Could a set of thieves search for people posting a vacation notice, image search for a house and then start correlating those images with Google Street View to find addresses? Sure, though arguably a search of public records for ownership might be easier. Many people rent, so maybe this is a bigger issue than I think? I’m not sure, and really, trying to determine how criminals might use data hurts my head.

    I do try not to be too paranoid, but I do get concerned about data privacy. The stories of abuse I hear in the world are truly stunning. The creativity of criminals is scary. I don’t know where to draw the lines, but I do think that we should neither be cavalier with data nor paranoid. There’s a balance to be found, but one that needs debate and deep thought, not casual dismissal or overreaching concern. I hope as a society that we move in the direction of careful consideration as we derive some framework for both the protection and use of personal data.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Learning more Kubernetes

    I’ve been slowly working my way through the 50 days of Kubernetes (K8s). As you might have guessed if you remember my first post, this has been more than 30 days. Life and work get in the way, but I’m working through the series of posts and videos.

    A couple of interesting things I’ve watched lately:

    Serverless Kubernetes and Serverless on Kubernetes – I worry about the idea of containers needing to spin up to meet serverless workloads, but maybe not. It’s a few ms for these containers to spin up, especially for small functional environments like Python or .NET. I suppose if there are issues, you can schedule more pods to be available or more replica sets to spread the load. This makes sense to me, and containers are often a perfect use for this on Kubernetes since you want to have lots of small items, but one large endpoint for people to hit things. I suspect this is how the FaaS implementations work on Azure and AWS.

    This video also talks about the need for a virtual kublet to allow the API to get things ready, without having underlying VMs, a prerequisite for scheduling items on the cloud. This is the serverless kubernetes concept. I’m not sure I completely understand this, but I get the idea here. We don’t have hardware provisioned, we’re running Kubernetes, and we want to push some of our load into the cloud. Since we don’t have a node assigned to us, we want to schedule on a virtual node that the cloud provider will actually spin up when we hit it.

    Fascinating and not something I’d have thought of before I saw this video.

    How the Kubernetes Scheduler Works –  This is interesting. Scheduling workloads and pods in different places is important. Flexibility while meeting demands matters. The idea of hard (required) and soft (optional or preferences) constraints for choosing where to run pods is fascinating. Another video by Brendon Burns. Most of us might care about these items since we may want some spreading assurances for instances or minimum resource requirements for our instances.

    For example, we might have a hard constraint that our pod (container) needs 128GB of RAM. This might limit the nodes that we want to run this pod on, and the scheduler takes this hard constraint into its decision making process.

    For soft constraints, we might prefer that a reporting instance not run on the same node as a OLTP instance, but if there are no nodes available, perhaps we’d live with this. That’s a soft constraint, and the scheduler tries to honor these, but it isn’t bound to prevent scheduling on those nodes.

  • Ransomware and DevOps

    Ransomware.

    A scary topic and one attack that is apparently more common than I suspected. Before you go further, if you haven’t restored a database backup in the last month, stop and go verify your DR plan works. That’s one of the overconfident issues facing lots of government and businesses. While this might not help your entire organization, at least you’ll have some confidence in your process and that you can recover a database.

    This is a great article from Ars Technica and worth reading: A take of two cities: Why ransomware will just get worse. I’d recommend you read it and think about a few things. First, do you have insurance because things (or substitute your own word here) happen? Second, have you really tested a DR plan for some sort of software issue like this? You might think about a way to restore systems in an air-gapped manner that prevents them from re-triggering encryption from a remote source, or maybe even in a scenario where you reset dates/times to prevent timer triggered issues. If you don’t think you need to, read this article as well.

    Perhaps the bigger issue is are you actually patching and updating systems? Too many organizations can’t, don’t, or won’t. The former means you aren’t sourcing software properly. Either you’re using vendors with poor practices or have a poor development process. Organizations that don’t or won’t bother prioritizing patching, especially security issues, are likely those that will have issues as more criminals spread and use ransomware and other attacks for profit. Software and environments continue to be more complex, which means that the less you ensure the system is patched, the more likelihood there is of a vulnerability in your environment.

    DevOps and the cloud PaaS/SaaS platforms are attractive for a few reasons. One is that the platforms are constantly kept up to date, forcing you to move along with them. SaaS cloud vendors know this and are constantly patching and updating their software in order to keep it running. DevOps asks that we always have the ability to release, that we have the ability to patch on demand, not only at certain intervals. This is something I try to emphasize when talking about DevOps. It isn’t necessarily about velocity, but it is about being able to release when you need to, whether that’s today or next month. This is especially important for security issues.

    I have had hope for a long time that insurance would drive software to higher quality, and I still do. With the attacks and issues of ransomware, and who knows what other techniques that will be developed, I still believe more companies will buy insurance. I then hope, because of selfish motives, the insurance companies will require frequent patching, regular vendor certification of new platform versions, and better development processes. If insurance drives DevOps, I’m all for it, but I’d prefer you decide to adopt it yourself and start making changes today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Republish: Dig Out the Root Cause

    Off to SQL Saturday Austin today, so you get Dig Out the Root Cause from the archives.

    Have a margarita and fajitas tonight in celebration of the great food I hope to enjoy in Austin.