Tag: DevOps

The ideas of DevOps are a mixture of principles, ideas, recommendations, tools, processes, attitudes, and more. There isn’t any  one way to implement a DevOps process, and plenty of people have been working in what many would consider a DevOps environment without calling it that. I really like Donovan Brown’s definition: “DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.”

That sums it up nicely, but what are some of the “value” items that we can deliver to our customers? Today I want to discuss one of these: security.

The historical view of a secure system is one that gets secured, rarely changes, and every change allowed is reviewed to ensure no mistakes are made. That view fits fine in a DevOps software pipeline, well, except the rare part. Does that make a DevOps built application less secure? Let’s turn that around. Is a traditional (waterfall, agile, etc.) application more secure because of the limitations?

I’d argue it’s not. One of the issues with security is that the issues, holes, and vulnerabilities constantly change. What was secure last week might not be secure this week. In traditional applications we find one of two things. Since deployments are relatively rare, security problems often remain un-patched for long periods of time, or they are patched quickly by changes to production systems that are not well tested or evaluated. There are countless tales of changes made to production applications that end up breaking the system and must be removed. The result, a less secure system. This can be especially problematic when dependent software, for example the OpenSSL issues, is not patched because there are so many dependencies that no one is willing to change the system for fear of causing downtime.

In a mature DevOps environment, the system is better understood because the software is regularly built, testing is automated, and there are regular deployments to various downstream environments. Security patches can be incorporated and deployed quickly, enabling the ability of our automated testing process and intermediate environments to look for potential issues. With a regular branching strategy, we can even quickly suspend current development and focus on producing a patch or changing other code to ensure a successful deployment. Because we practice regular deployments, the need for un-tested, cowboy code changes in production is eliminated.

Certainly a DevOps process doesn’t preclude making mistakes. It doesn’t ensure developers or administrators won’t create vulnerabilities (intentional or accidental). DevOps doesn’t prevent mistakes. DevOps does ask us to continually learn and get feedback from our efforts. And it asks that we incorporate that feedback into our process. If we find a problem in how we write code, a test missed, or a problem in deployment, we correct that in our automated process to prevent it happening again. And since every task, every build, every deployment is logged, we can audit everyone’s actions. DevOps certainly encourages more security, though not perfect security. The goal is that a DevOps process gets us a little better security every time we learn something.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

I was listening to a DevOps podcast from Josh Corman, of Rugged Software. Rugged Software aims to improve security by asking developers and sysadmins to adhere to their manifesto, which recognizes both the importance of software in the modern world, as well as the problems associated by not properly securing and patching software. These are duties that both developers and administrators should perform in their respective roles.

The goal of the Rugged Software is to promote best practices and constant vigilence to create and deploy secure code, and ensure that software installations remain that way. This isn’t a security state, but rather a process. A way to approach software development, deployment, administration, and maintenance to improve the security of our computer systems. This maps nicely to a DevOps approach to software development, with a focus on security. The ideas here include not just patching, but fixing underlying issues, learning from mistakes and from other organizations, improving the skills of their developers and administrators. This is a holistic approach to ensuring security.

This not only includes the software we write, but also the software products, platforms, libraries, etc. that we use. For many of us, this means the Windows host OS, the networking software and connections, http servers, vendor .NET libraries, and more. This also includes database software of all sorts, whether you use an RDBMS like SQL Server, perhaps a search service like ElasticSearch, a caching database like Redis, or some other NoSQL data store.

The idea is that we not only code securely, but also make sure we patch our software. That’s a problem in many cases. In fact, MongoDB has had a security issue for the past few years that was well publicized but still affects many installations. Far too few people have patched their MongoDB databases, and it’s a problem. Data is exposed to anyone on the Internet, and it’s likely someone is taking advantage of this to access the bits. In fact, many hackers exploit flaws in software for which patches are often available. The updates just haven’t been deployed.

Patching software is a challenge, and it seems that there is no shortage of ways in which companies deploy updates. Microsoft is pushing automatic patches. Some applications make these optional. Some apply changes in the background, some require downloads. If you use a service, then patches are seamless, but the changes may break functionality or force a new workflow on the user.

Ultimately I think that we, as an industry, need to mature with the ways in which we patch software. Customers and clients should demand better, and the impact of applying patches should go down. Quality should go up, and while that has happened with some companies, I think we need better patterns and practices that are taught and adopted by more developers. Perhaps more people sharing their techniques, templates, and practices will help others become better at building and managing our software updates.

Steve Jones