"It seems like you’ve never worked with critical infra."
My entire career has been spent building, and maintaining, critical infra.[1]
Further, in my volunteer time, I come into contact with medical, dispatch and life-safety systems and equipment built on Windows and my question remains the same:
Why is Windows anywhere near critical infra ?
Just because it is common doesn't mean it's any less shameful and inadequate.
I repeat: We've fully understood these risks and frailties for 25 years.
[1] As a craft, and a passion - not because of "exciting career opportunities in IT".
Is this the rsync.net HN account? If so, lmao @ the comment you replied to.
> As a craft, and a passion
I believe you’ve nailed the core problem. Many people in tech are not in it because they genuinely love it, do it in their off time, and so on. Companies, doubly so. I get it, you have to make money, but IME, there is a WORLD of difference in ability and self-solving ability between those who love this shit, and those who just do it for the money.
What’s worse is that actual fundamental knowledge is being lost. I’ve tried at multiple companies to shift DBs off of RDS / Aurora and onto at the very least, EC2s.
“We don’t have the personnel to support that.”
“Me. I do this at home, for fun. I have a rack. I run ZFS. Literally everything in this RFC, I know how to do.”
“Well, we don’t have anyone else.”
And that’s the damn tragedy. I can count on one hand the number of people I know with a homelab who are doing anything other than storing media. But you try telling people that they should know how to administer Linux before they know how to administer a K8s cluster, and they look at you like you’re an idiot.
The old school sysadmins who know technology well are still around but there is increasingly less of them while the demand skyrockets as our species gives computers an increasing number of responsibilities.
There is tremendous demand for technology that works well and works reliably. Sure, setting up a database running on an EC2 instance is easy. But do you know all of the settings to make the db safe to access? Do you maintain it well, patch it, replicate it, etc? This can all be done by one of the old school sysadmins. But they are rare to find, and not easy to replace. It's hard to judge from the outside, even if you are an expert in the field.
So when the job market doesn't have the amount of sysadmins/devops engineers available, then the cloud offers a good replacement. Even if you as an individual company can solve it by offering more money and having a tougher selection process, this doesn't scale over the entire field, as at that point the whole number of available experts comes in.
Aurora is definitely expensive, but there is cheaper alternatives to it. Full disclosure, I'm employed by one of these alternative vendors (Neon). You don't have to use it, but many people do and it makes their life easier. The market is expected to grow a lot. Clouds seem to be one of the ways our industry is standardizing.
I’m not even a sysadmin, I just learned how to do stuff in Gentoo in the early ‘00s. Undoubtedly there are graybeards who will laugh at the ease of tooling that was available to me.
> But do you know all of the settings to make the db safe to access? Do you maintain it well, patch it, replicate it, etc?
Yes, but to be fair, I’m a DBRE (and SRE before that). I’m not advocating that someone without fairly deep knowledge attempt to do this in prod at a company of decent size. But your tiny startup? Absolutely; chuck a default install of Postgres or MySQL onto Debian, and optionally tune 2 – 3 settings (shared_buffers, effective_cache_size, and random_page_cost for Postgres; (innodb_buffer_pool_* and sync_array_size for MySQL – the latter isn’t necessary until you have high concurrency, but it also can’t be changed without a restart so may as well). Pick any major backup solution for your DB (Barman for Postgres, XtraBackup for MySQL, etc.), and TEST YOUR BACKUPS. That’s about it. Apply any security patches (or use unattended-upgrades, just be careful) as they’re released, and don’t do anything outside of your distro’s package management. You’ll be fine.
Re: Neon, I’ve not used it, but I’ve read your docs extensively. It’s the most interesting Postgres-aaS product I’ve seen, alongside postgres.ai, but you’re (I think) targeting slightly different audiences. I wish you luck!
> It’s the most interesting Postgres-aaS product I’ve seen, alongside postgres.ai, but you’re (I think) targeting slightly different audiences. I wish you luck!
Also a lot of the passionate security people such as myself moved on to other fields as it has just become bullshit artists sucking on the vendors teat and filling out risk matrix sheets, but no accountability when their risk assessments invariably turn out to be wrong.
In the past, old versions of Windows were often considered superior because they stopped changing and just kept working. Today, that strategy is breaking down because attackers have a lot more technology available to them: a huge database of exploits, faster computers, IoT botnets, and so on. I suspect we're going to see a shift in the type of operating system hospitals run. It might be Linux or a more hardened version of Windows. Either way, the OS vendor should provide all security infrastructure, not a third party like Crowdstrike, IMHO.
> I suspect we're going to see a shift in the type of operating system hospitals run. It might be Linux or a more hardened version of Windows.
Why? "Hardening" the OS is exactly what Crowdstrike sells and bricked the machines with.
Centralization is the root cause here. There should be no by design way for this to happen. That also rules out Microsoft's auto updates. Only the IT department should be able to brick the hospitals machines.
Hardening is absolutely not what crowdstrike sells. They essentially sell OS monitoring and anomaly detection. OS monitoring involves minimizing the attack surface, usually by minimizing the number of services running and limiting the ability to modify the OS
Nothing wrong with that. Windows XP-64 supports up to 128GB physical RAM, could be 5 years until that is available on laptops. Windows 7 Pro supports up to 192 GB of RAM. Now if you were to ask me what you would run on those systems with maxed out RAM, I wouldn't know. I also don't think the Excel version that runs on those versions of windows allows partially filled cells for Gantt charts.
>Most of it runs on 6 to 10 year old unpatched versions of Windows…
Well, that's a pretty big problem. I don't know how we ended up in a situation where everybody is okay with the most important software being the most insecure, but the money needed to keep critical infra totally secure is clearly less than the money (and lives!) lost when the infra crashes.
