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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

Forget for a second the security concerns -

If you lose :latest, and the build breaks, you need to spend unexpected time fixing the build, for whatever reason that :latest broke it, in order to continue with the business objective that you were actually tasked to do. Essentially, you have InfoSec muscling in and demanding, by the most coercive way possible, that Thou Shalt Not Do Your Job Without Bowing Before Me. Who cares what the business wanted? Who cares about predictable schedules? Who cares about delivering for a customer by a point in time which was promised to the customer?

This isn't the way to promote a healthy culture in the company. Nobody should get immediate and total veto rights. In the real world, healthy organizations balance between different stakeholders, and once a path is set, everybody shuts up and executes. The right place to make a stand for your interests is in the stakeholder meeting, not the deployment pipeline.

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This! It gets even better - there WILL be a time at your company when you'll need to revert for whatever reason. That reason will most likely be something VeryImportant(tm) and will probably have to be done RightNow(tm) on weekend if you're unlucky.

At that time, you REALLY don't want to find out that you forgot to pin your dependencies and that your older build now doesn't run due to breaking changes and you have no frigging idea what versions of that random NPM crap library were you running 5 weeks ago.

Just... don't do that to yourself. Ever. Pin dependencies, update them regulary, but update them as YOUR decision under YOUR CONTROL. Not under some techbros control based on his GitHub pushes. If you're smart, also host your own repository (Maven, Npm, Docket, whatnot) with your dependencies so your business can't be distrupted by some techbro drama and missing packages.

(This is one of those lessons old neckbears learned on their own skin.)

> you have no frigging idea what versions of that random NPM crap library were you running 5 weeks ago.

The most telling part of this screed is that you don’t appear to know you can tell exactly what version you were using at any version-controlled point in time by looking at the lock file for NPM.

My default workflow is not to the pin the version. The build will only break occasionally and is often trivial to fix. In the rare case it does require significant amount of work, and management is breathing down your neck, you do temporarily pin the version to get out the release, and create a backlog ticket to resolve this as soon as possible.

This workflow ensures any work for minor version upgrade is part of the development workflow. PMs can't deprioritise this work against more exciting shiny product features. If you include this as separate development tickets, it just tends to get deprioritised until it becomes a big chunk of work.

> This workflow ensures any work for minor version upgrade is part of the development workflow. PMs can't deprioritise this work against more exciting shiny product features. If you include this as separate development tickets, it just tends to get deprioritised until it becomes a big chunk of work.

Instead of your maintenance work being visible, you're hiding it. You're describing an adversarial culture, one where you need to do shadow work because you don't trust management to prioritize necessary maintenance, perhaps one where management doesn't trust engineering to place maintenance in its proper context. I don't think this is an ideal, I think this is sad.

I am not hiding it, I make it integral part of the development process, as it should be. Treating technical debt as a separate work item is asking for problems.

> you have InfoSec muscling in and demanding, by the most coercive way possible, that Thou Shalt Not Do Your Job Without Bowing Before Me.

InfoSec is not optional.

Of course it's not. But it's not King, either.

If you're fedramp certified, they kinda are. Fedramp is the key that unlocks a lot of really high-paying customers, and if you lose your certification those customers (with their firehose of revenue) go poof.

How to lose certification: Don't address a known vulnerability (CVE) within a specific number of days, based on severity. Doesn't matter if it's log4j or some random executable in your images that's never used.

When you're up to hundreds of services, thousands of packages, and millions in revenue from Fedramp customers, InfoSec gets pretty important.

FedRAMP also requires you to explicitly give veto power to InfoSec at every stage of design, development, implementation, operation, and maintenance, and to employ a Change Control Board (CM-03).

There's only ~250 companies / products that are Authorized at any level of FedRAMP, and many of them are explicitly "Federal" versions of their products in order to isolate the organizational controls away from affecting their commercial offerings.

I could see it argued that in $CurrentYear, any information oriented company that doesn't put InfoSec as their #1 priority, is just asking to be pwned. It's not an if, but a when and to what extent.

No, #1 priority is always doing core business - the job that gets money in, satisfies users and keeps the company running. Everything else comes after - without core business, infosec is pointless and can't sustain itself.

InfoSec is critically important, but it's important just like IT people, janitors and server maintainers - business breaks without them, but they aren't actually earning money and prioritizing them over core business is the tail wagging the dog.

(And yes, I've seen way too much entitled "InfoSec" experts explicitly undermining their own company because they forgot that. Read The Phoenix Project or similar for concrete examples.)

> they aren't actually earning money and prioritizing them over core business is the tail wagging the dog.

Uhm, InfoSec helps prevent your company from hemorrhaging money and trust in the form of fines and lawsuits. That makes them a touch more important than you make them out to be.

The bigger a companies customers are, the more important InfoSec becomes to your "core business", because the certifications and security required by those customers have large infosec requirements.

That's also your HR and accounting teams' jobs, but they don't tend to assert that they need to be treated as Big Damn Heroes for it.

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