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by crabbone 1208 days ago
This is both a misunderstanding of the problem and an attempt to solve an administrative problem using technology... which cannot really solve it.

Developers have nothing to do with this. It's a common practice in companies that have "expensive" production environment (eg. VMs rented from AWS) that developers never get any kind of access to production environment. Ever. At all. No need to tie developers' hand by putting them behind a ton of unnecessary firewalls. They have no need for the sensitive information and shouldn't be burdened by protecting it.

The few people who do have access to company's "expensive" production environment are / should be very few people, most likely in the infra / DevOps department. These people do need to follow special protocol for communicating with the "expensive" environment, which, likely, doesn't happen all that often. Depends on the product, of course, but unlikely to be more than once a day, or even once a week.

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PS. In many, many years of being in infra / system / automation I had never typed any passwords for any important services I had to use. They are usually difficult to type due to having all kinds of Unicode characters I wouldn't know how to reproduce w/o a little research. It's also very rare that they end up in system clipboard, since I usually end up using something like vi+tmux over SSH in Emacs' ascii-term to copy the password from somewhere and paste it somewhere else. So, stuff like AWS keys would have to be stolen by taking screenshots of my screen or something like that...

I mean, why on Earth would anyone deploy to production environment from their personal laptop? Normally, deployment is made from some sort of a testing / staging environment where the system was being tested / archived before shipping it to the next stop... It sounds like some kind of emergency / unplanned situation where a DevOps had to log into the remote system from their laptop.

1 comments

Are you misunderstanding the term "DevOps"? You build it, you run it. If a DevOps team only runs things other developers have build, it is not a DevOps team.
In this case, DevOps shouldn't be rearchitecting, developing, or changing a password management's solution, crypto, architechture, or design in any way. Not in the slightest.
No. I'm not.
There seem to be two competing definitions