Many people are familiar with the software development process that takes place before pushing code to production. However, they’re not familiar with what happens to code post-production. There’s a lot that goes on under the hood. Let’s talk about it.
Production Changes
Traditionally, production changes would require a system reboot, but with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and related processes, production changes have become less intrusive.
CI/CD allows developers and organizations to push their changes to production more rapidly, and with less worry about a production outage. This means faster releases with reduced risk—the best outcome.
Production Data
Data privacy/security and data processing controls are critical to modern software production environments—from product features, like personalization, to regulatory compliance.
This is a massive topic, but here are three important things to consider:
- Having access controls around production data
- Migration controls, including known rollback procedures
- A comprehensive backup, recovery, and rollback plan to handle lost data
Needless to say, a data breach, or losing customer data can be devastating for your organization. But simple organizational controls go a long way in protecting against insider threats, and should be implemented at all organization sizes.
Production Rollback
Do you have a protocol and process to rollback an unstable or buggy release? Can you verify specific changes after the rollback takes place?
A bad release should be rolled back ASAP, and your system should return to its previous state without any issues.
This requires a defined set of instructions covering databases, third-party APIs, dependencies, and environment variables for smooth rollback— and ideally automated.
Access, Collaboration and Security
As your organization scales, the amount of engineers who need production access will ultimately scale as well. Access and collaboration in production become critical at this point.
Your engineers should be able to access production without waiting on IT to provision them access.
Your organization should know the who, what, when, where, and why in any production environment.
This is where a tool like Cased comes into play. By controlling SSH access via your SSO with MFA, developers can access prompts 10x faster than before.
Additionally, Cased empowers organizations to stay compliant with comprehensive audit trails for every SSH session.
If you're interested and want to learn more schedule a demo or visit our documentation.
