It's time to leave GCP, AWS, and the rest.
Google and Amazon markup can eat it. Fuck those guys.
Let's not forget that Google and Amazon tried to offshore us, played a role in inventing the labor-displacing models in the first place, and that don't give a shit about any of us.
I hope they ossify and turn into the next IBMs.
They thought AI would lead to growth and a greater concentration of wealth for themselves, but it's actually the seeds of their own destruction and dismantlement.
Supposedly Apple holds the encryption keys on their own infra, but I still found it interesting how they are just reselling Google Cloud storage here.
You see this already with uptime. If Github or AWS has a major outage, it's in the news and even people that don't understand software realize it's just "something happening today, everything is down".
And, unfortunately, in practice customers don't care about this inverse, when "everyone else is down but not that one product".
You can't defend yourself from everything, but you can try to make you life easier by reducing the attack surface and make side movements more difficult.
It will take a few bankruptcies until security is taken seriously.
This has happened to many high-profile self-hosted pieces of software just this past month.
Or do you mean a customer was running it?
> But then, you're unlikely to be the top target of anything.
That would have protected you 3 years ago when a human had to bother to attack you. Today it doesn't protect you because it's trivial to deploy an LLM to act like an APT against any random target that shows up in shodan.
It takes more effort to secure on-prem software today than it did just a couple of years ago. Updates are more frequent, zero days are more frequent, attacks are more common, more persistent, and more automated.
I think most people responsible for securing production systems today will share the experience that their workload has increased.
And I am literally a security engineer; the work has absolutely not gotten harder, it's just changing in how you think about security, just like it shifted before from "secure the perimeter" to "defense-in-depth", it's now changing again to focus on automated response and compartmentalization/ segmentation (and I mean real segmentation, not the checklist-style "we have 3 vlans, but they can all talk to each other" 'segmentation' you used to see.
Yes, everyone is rushing to implement zero-trust principles for real now. It's getting harder to trust that your public facing endpoints don't have vulnerabilities, and it's getting harder to trust that your internal software and endpoints haven't been compromised from within your pre-existing trust boundaries. A lot of the increased workload is due to patching up the existing security infrastructure, and on top of that, building out new solutions to better fit today's threat landscape.
For stuff like Netflix that is truly consumer-facing, where mTLS or IP whitelisting are non-starters, the reality is you have to rethink your model entirely.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea I'm talking about on-prem only; this also applies to using IaaS/ cloud hosted infra.
If you're a security engineer responsible for securing only:
1. a public website
2. stuff that can be ip whitelisted and/or use mTLS
Consider yourself very lucky. Most orgs need to expose a lot more than that.
> Most orgs need to expose a lot more than that.
No, in fact there are only 2 kinds of connections:
1) public, necessarily allows anonymous/unauthenticated connections
2) non-public, doesn't need to allow unauthenticated connections
Name a service, and I can tell you which one it is.
Or put another way, there are authenticated and unauthenticated services. If you can authenticate someone at the application level, you could do it at the network level.
Most places have combined them at some boundary, for ease of access, but there is no case in which an authenticated application endpoint (even /login) has to allow unauthenticated network access to it.
And in all seriousness, name a service that is not a public website, but cannot use mTLS or IP allowlisting.
SFDC? mTLS. Customer webhooks? IP whitelisting. Data warehouse? PtP VPN.
They do it all the time, piecemeal, that's part of what anything-as-a-service delivers. If you don't want to secure an app, buy a SaaS one. Don't want to secure infrastructure?, buy an IaaS.
> Most places have combined them at some boundary, for ease of access, but there is no case in which an authenticated application endpoint (even /login) has to allow unauthenticated network access to it.
> And in all seriousness, name a service that is not a public website, but cannot use mTLS or IP allowlisting.
Literally any SaaS software where the customer does not or cannot practically install a certificate for you or provide a list of IPs in advance? mTLS is almost never used in a browser unless you are connecting to a government website with a pre-shared smartcard. IP whitelisting is great if the end users only work from behind a VPN or in an office. But there's a whole big world of people who cannot or will not do that.
There are already plenty of methods that are low-impact to users, like certificate-pinning in apps, and all you have to do to make it per-user is roll in their user-specific key JIT when they download the app.
Users will not be happy (just as no one is happy Reddit is going app-only), but they will do it, especially when it becomes common as companies decide they don't want to be the 5th breach notification on HN in a given day.
Today we have Bun, Cursor, Northflank, and now Linode!
2) that's not what "rolling your own" means. Building your own web proxy is "rolling your own". Standing up e.g. Caddy and configuring it is not.
> I think people will move back to their own hardware
> self-hosted pieces of software
2. arguably -- but lets set aside what you think the word means and respond to the obvious meaning of the comment you're replying to.
The point is -- doing shit yourself makes it your problem to do correctly and requires sufficient resource allocation
2. I still don't see where you got that they are only talking about configurations versus messing up an implementation (I.e. in a paramater they coded incorrectly)...
But that aside, even on AWS you're still configuring your proxies, gateways, load balancers, etc. AWS gives you just as much rope to hang yourself with as a box in a colo network cage does. Companies are already doing this stuff themselves, on-prem is not more security work. IaaS is about scaling and maintenance load, not security being handled for you.