Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ilikebits 423 days ago
Our use case is customers who (1) want to use a managed cloud hosting service that we provide, but (2) are not willing to give us their signing keys. Our design allows them to keep all of their signing keys local to their environment.

To our knowledge, we have not found another provider who supports both of these requirements. It's not some amazing technical innovation, but it is one of those annoying paper cuts that builds up with all the others.
2 comments
benwilber0 423 days ago
> when we tried to use them in production at scale

Debian and Ubuntu have been using them in production and "at scale" for decades. What are the "sharp edges" that you're trying to solve?

link
ilikebits 423 days ago
That's true! The Debian and Ubuntu folks are also experts at this. In our experience, the sharp edges generally affect teams that don't have a lot of in-house expertise in this, and where release engineering is not a core engineering competency that they want to invest in.
link
rlpb 423 days ago
Signing an unsigned apt repository is about three gpg commands though. I don't see how this kind of thing requires a whole separate product.
link
ilikebits 423 days ago
Yeah, solving this locally for one repository definitely isn't that hard at all. Most of the features we're building become useful when you're trying to build CI integrations for a larger team while also complying with enterprise security requirements (e.g. audit logging, HSM key protections, etc.).
link