Ask HN: How many engineers have direct access to production where you work? I've seen situations where everyone on the engineering team have direct SSH access to the production database and other cases where practically no one does, and everything is done through GitOps or similar peer-reviewed migrations. Curious what have you seen when it comes to production access? |
Some of the… more permissive arrangements have been rather… fascinating.
Some of the supposedly well regulated ones were more like cults. Bring your completed forms, receive your foolishly named certification. Oh the things the forms are asking about? Nah it doesn’t really matter. Understand the requirements? You bet. There’s only one. Complete those forms. Get that star.
Not sure I have ever seen it done well. Certainly some places far better than others.
The DBA team sets up databases and service accounts. They give those accounts to the developers. The two can’t do each others’ jobs. It helps that we are regularly audited.
Have also worked at a startup where things where as you described. I ended that immediately. It took us some time to figure out who needed what and how we could accommodate proper controls.
It really depends on circumstances, but start thinking in terms of “blast radius”.
That doesn’t sound like full access to production.
I bet they didn’t even have cloud console admin.
Each team that owns a service has access to the prod environment(s) for said service (including the cloud console, a shell on a prod machine with admin privileges, etc) provided they get peer approval for the access they need.
Any privileged access is done through our jump boxes.
However there are times where we need full access to production like some of our applications would which makes us question the whole point of the excerise.