Etsy • enterprise, fraud, security, fun • But.. on very good terms. In fact Etsy sponsored my trip here • VP Engineering, “Company Confidential” • Stay tuned for details Nick Galbreath www.client9.com @ngalbreath
is software development • Mostly in public, web-facing applications • Everything from C to PHP • Your mileage may vary if you are in different industries, with different risk profiles
vulnerabilities aren’t conceptually that hard and should be easy to deal with. • In spite (or because) of our efforts, security is an “end of line” process or whack-a-mole • Security education has been at best marginally useful to developers (in the large, your organization may be different). • How can we get ever get ahead?
Product Model is designed for applications where the cost of distribution is high. Where “high” might be measure by risk, money, time, resources, customer annoyance. • Retail, CD/DVDs • Embedded or Exotic Hardware • Safety, Medical or Defense Systems • Operating Systems (phone or desktop) • Your Homework (1-time deploy)
software product model since that’s all we knew • High barrier to entry • Specialized Hardware, software, people to get started • Lots of engineering to keep things running and scaling.
out the spelling error change since it’s too risky” • “That code has already been through QA, it’s locked down.” • “Product has to prioritize that, else we aren’t touching it.” This Smells
WebApps 2012 are data-driven. • and frequently have APIs, user-generated content, social features (unexpected use cases, new problems) • Failure might be due to algorithm problems, but... • ...more likely it’s bad user input, bad data in database, or operational load. • This means data added in the past might cause problems in the future. Complicated!
There is a long time between code-written to code- deployed. This “non-value added” steps for what should be low-cost changes. • Might be weeks or months before code deployed. • Feedback loop between code in dev and code in production broken. • When the bug/security report comes in, it’s likely the engineer is on a different project. • Any wonder that engineers don’t care for operations or security?
to simulate the production environment in development, either to operational differences or data differences. • No amount of QA or Security Testing can prove you don’t have bugs, vulnerabilities, or won’t cause severe operational problems. • You have bugs and vulnerabilities right now your site.
move faster • Being a bottleneck isn’t acceptable. • Nor is giving up or saying “need more resources” • Engineers disengaged • Looming security disaster awaits • Whack-a-Mole doesn’t scale
Software Production Characterized By Numerous Small Changes to the Production Environment or That Crazy Shit That Etsy Does. And Google. And Facebook. And Amazon. And Twitter. And NetFlix. So maybe not that crazy.
Button that said DEPLOY This button logs who performed the change, and what the change was, but no other rules or controls. •Pushes whatever is on HEAD/TRUNK to production. •In about a minute. •Anyone is allowed to push it.
no one is going to push it since they are afraid they’ll break something. • Meanwhile un-deployed code keeps piling up. ex. New hires are terrified of deploying an... HTML change! “but I don’t want to break Etsy!”
At some point, some brave sole will put their code on TRUNK, and push the button. • It’s likely someone else tells them that their feature blew up the site or doesn’t work, and to please role it back.
The developer learns that they’d don’t know how the code runs in production and they need some way of understanding how it works. • Enter Graphite/Ganglia/StatsD! http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/ measure-anything-measure-everything/ • Make it free to monitor anything in the application and expose that to everyone.
Repushing out code with fix, still causes some problem as witness by a graph falling off a cliff, but the developer was aware of it and was able to role back.
the developer in reviewing the code notices that actually they are pushing a few bugs fixes, and some other minor features. • Maybe just pushing out a single bug fix one at time to help isolate the problem.
The developer pushed code and fixed a bug and made the site just that much better. • The secret about continuous deployment is small deltas that you or anyone can understand easily.
Now that the developer got the bugs out of the way, it time for the feature. • Let’s push out all the supporting files. By themselves they do nothing. By getting these out first, you isolate them as being “unlikely to cause a site problem” • Also now that they are on the trunk, others can look at them (easily).
it’s time to get that feature live. • Instead of a Big Bang, he’ll put a ‘rampup’ in the code. This will control how many people on the site will get the new feature. • Maybe start with “employees only” so his team can test in production. • Start at 1%, 5%, 10% and make sure things work, graphs are stable and work up to 100%. • if problem, can rampdown or turn off.
the way you’ll get burned by little things, so, we’ll • A development environment that mimics prod as close as possible (won’t be exact) • Fast and stable unit and functional tests that are easy to run. If they are slow and flakey, no one will use them • Eliminate stupid bugs with commit or pre-commit static analysis. • Move QA/Security/Release checks as close as possible to the developer.
more people get use to it, you’ll need a way of co-ordinating releases among people. • IRC works well • Need set of conventions that match your risk levels. • At least developers are talking about releases!
doubt along the way, serious mistakes will be made. Complex system failures will happen. • Learn from them. Do Post-Mortems. Do Root-Cause Analysis. • Recount what happened. • 99.99999999% of problems are caused by mistakes not maliciousness • How can the environment be changed so it doesn’t happen again? • Publish the results.
Pushes at 3AM • That Guy who pushes at 3AM, and something goes wrong and wakes up all of operations with pagers going off will quickly learn this was a bad idea. • It’s about courtesy and respect. • Of course there are off-hours exception, in which That Guy should pre-inform everyone.
Yup, do them • Nothing here precludes code reviews. • In fact, it’s frequently easier to do since the reviewer doesn’t have to dork around with branches or tags.... they have all the dark code already on Trunk/Head • .. and the reviews are smaller and faster
(everyone does “agile differently” so hard to qualify this). • Agile methods frequently work to improve the spec-writing / development cycle • Or the spec / dev / qa cycle • But code still pools up waiting to go to production.
Do they freak out with all the changes? • Remember, most changes either do nothing, or are trivial or are minor. • Feature launches always need to be co- ordinated with customer service (from audience question)
push code is now sensitized that their code has consequences and are responsive to fix it. It’s amazing how interested engineers become in security when you find problems with their code when they are able to fix quickly themselves.
stack, graphing and log analysis for attack detection and vulnerability prevention. Need ideas? Check out these other presentations on fraud and security by Etsy: http://slidesha.re/IMaavq http://slidesha.re/JGaU2s http://slidesha.re/KPvHYu http://slidesha.re/Kw5zdV
Developers: works with operations • QA: works on making systems to empower people to write tests, static analysis, in-house consultancy on good test design • Release: tools to push code to production, system images. • Security: in house consultancy, security engineering, secure by default, detection
updates painless for the consumer. • Frequent changes “regularly” -- maybe not continuous but way faster than normal software product • Multiple channels of releases. • Config flags can turn on or off experimental features. • Works so well, many others are copying this approach.
of deployment being high (e.g. due to approval from Apple) • And due to diversity of destination (how many different types of hardware will it run on), hard to predict how well it work. • Put as much as you can into the release • Then read configs from internet to light up or turn off features
talk, I met an engineer who does hardware design. • All changes are tiny and then tested, then committed. • Any change too big is rejected. • Learned the hard way that big changes are impossible to understand and test.
Position to Force Change • Security bridges multiple disciplines: ops, dev, qa, release, business. Unique position to make change. • When breach happens (in whatever the layer), we need to patch fast. • I hope that is not controversial.