[lordnacho]

They could have helped their luck by doing some of the common sense things suggested in the article.

For instance, why not find a subset of your customers that are low risk, push it out to them, and see what happens? Or perhaps have your own fleet of example installations to run things on first. None of which depends on any specific technology.

[hello_moto]

"find a subset of low risk customers" and use them as test subject?

Repeat that a few times to understand the repercussions.

If I were the customers and I found out that I was used as test subject, how would I feel?

[lordnacho]

> If I were the customers and I found out that I was used as test subject, how would I feel?

In reality, every business has relationships that it values more than others. If I wasn't paying a lot for it, and if I was running something that wasn't critical (like my side project) then why not? You can price according to what level of service you want to provide.

[hello_moto]

Customers will ask to opt-out.

[ahtihn]

Customers will pay to opt out.

[whynotminot]

Canary deployments are already an industry accepted practice and it’s shocking Crowdstrike apparently doesn’t do them.

[hello_moto]

Which industry? Cybersecurity or Cloud software?

[whynotminot]

Any industry that wants to reliably deliver software that doesn’t brick systems at scale? I’m confused by your question.

Are you telling me the cybersecurity scene is special and shouldn’t follow best practices for software deployment?

[hello_moto]

Canary deployment for subset of Salesforce customers won't see much of revolt from customers compare to AV definition rollout (not software, but AV definition) in Cybersecurity where gaps between 0day and rollout means you're exposed.

If customers found out that some are getting roll out faster than the others, essentially splitting the group into 2, there will be a need for customer opt-in/opt-out.

If everyone is opting-out because of Friday, your Canary deployment becomes meaningless.

Any proof that other Cybersecurity vendors do Canary deployment for their AV definition? :)

PS: not to say that the company should test more internally...

[whynotminot]

Canary deployment doesn’t necessarily mean massive gaps between deployment waves. You can fast-follow. Sure, there may be scenarios with especially severe vulnerabilities where time is of the essence. I’m out of the loop if this crowdstrike update was such a scenario where best practices for software deployment were worth bypassing.

If this is just how they roll with regular definition updates, then their deployment practices are garbage and this kind of large scale disaster was inevitable.

[gtsop]

Why even do that? We have virtualization, they could emulate real clients and networks of clients. This particular bug would have been prevented for sure

[lordnacho]

Yeah I thought maybe the VM thing might not catch the bug for some reason, but it seems like the natural thing to do. Spin up VM, see if there's a crash. I heard the technical reason had something to do with a file being full of nulls, but that sort of thing you should catch.

Honestly, the most generous excuse I can think of is that CS were informed of some sort of vulnerability that would have profound consequences immediately, and that necessitated a YOLO push. But even that doesn't seem too likely.