https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K44j-sb1SRY

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6YHEK6-Ili8

Near Yarra Junction today

Beer is oddly terrible and weak in Australia but Toohey’s Old is good, more rare down here in Vic though

Former coworkers: “oh, these two lines are the same in function x and function y. TIME TO ABSTRACT”

FUCK. Triggers me. Just got let go from a place that had this problem and wouldn’t let me make any changes whatsoever. I didn’t even push hard.

Interesting. My perspective is that a strong, small team building a monolith has to think of constraints and design for them, and the microservices teams make choices in the local instead of the global maximum, which reduces cohesion and incurs communication costs. I would think that carving out a service from a monolith would be easier than the reverse direction, although maybe you’re with me on that.

Dude thank you for your detailed reply which I have been thinking about for a while.

I don’t want to mischaracterise what you’re saying but I want to try to summarise the lessons, which I think are super valid.

1. Some external layers or services are basically essential, like a WAF/auth/rate limiter/API gateway/reverse proxy. Or DB.
2. Observability and logging, and rapid response to anomalies, together with a honeypot, go a long way toward maintaining security.

This is definitely a way to think about this that I haven’t distilled. Thanks!

Mods you might want to remove this due to no politics, I will myself if you dont

You have me thinking. My gut tells me this is true.

For example, if you have a segmented auth service that someone gets root on, it’s possible for someone to act as anyone else, but not get the whole database if unavailable to all users.

If your load balancer gets compromised, you could cause denial of service or act as a man-in-the-middle for all requests.

If your database gets got, that’s the worst, but you generally can’t intercept web requests and other front-end facing things.

But, I’d like to play devil’s advocate here. I feel that most of these segmented architecture strategies may have negative security implications as well.

First, the overall attack surface increases. There are more redundant mechanisms, more links in the chain, probably more differing types of security/tokens/certificates that can get exploited. It also adds maintenance burden, which I believe reduces security because other priorities may get in the way if things are cumbersome.

In my examples above, a compromise of the auth service in most cases pretty much means a complete compromise of the what your system allows its highest level users to do. Which is normally a lot.

Getting a load balancer will allow an attacker to MITM if TLS termination happens there, and basically this can mean the same as in the auth service, plus XSS-type stuff.

If the service hosting the database is compromised, it’s kinda game over. Including XSS.

So what have we gained here?

A monolith hosting all of these has more or less the same consequences if compromised. However, if it’s all together, it becomes everyone’s responsibility and there are more eyes on each aspect of your application. You’re more likely to update things that need updating. Traffic can be analysed a little easier.

Just wanted to jot down some notes because I have a talk coming up and need to prepare for this question. Please prod my thinking, it would really help me out!

Devs used to have to consider deployment and uptime! They still should. We as an industry became arbitrarily segmented and irresponsible. I have never gotten used to this tossing shit over the fence.

Yeah that’s some Pope shit to do

Didn’t even think of that. You’re right.

Dual citizen with Australia, sorry. Though it is fairly light paperwork for Americans who are in tech - as in the U.S., the best chances are to get in stateside with a big company that has an Aussie HQ (Atlassian, Xero, Canva, FAANG, etc.) and then transfer

You know what? You’re absolutely right.

People: please leave flying 737s to trained experts with the know-how, FAA licensure, and medical clearance. They know better than you even if you think you can do it from a meme.

It’s very important that you not touch ANY of the buttons and dials on a 737. People could get hurt or even die if you do.

Such better political discussions here than on Reddit

I left and got two Sr SWE positions within 3 months. It’s like the 90’s down here