Pwning your web server the easy way or why exposing –/.ssh/ is a bad idea

I guess you prove a point here: you trust that the deployment of your GKE module allows you to be safe, so your investment vs risk trade seems to satisfy you. But you, yourself, cannot even predict how insecure you are at the moment due to the complexity of the software solutions you are using.

> I suppose we'll see if companies with sysadmins have more breaches than the guys who run their own ops using container orchestration etc.

Oh, I do agree, at least with the current state of sysadmins out there.

But the problem is that you loose control of the integrity of your system once you reach a point where software complexity becomes your security entry point.

If you are sure the containers you will be using are secure, have sane defaults, are up to date, etc, then fine, good job! I just don't trust that most people will be able to reassure me that. And please keep in mind that in your case, the target is not your container platform, the target would be the containers in that platform, and the services they run.

And yes, I do expect the failure point to be my containers, not the container orch platform. The container orch platform allows me to use containers, though, and the fact that containers aren't append-only the way that long-running machines run by sysadmins are gives me a head start out of the gate.

The abstractions provided by the OS compose in very surprising and hard to predict ways for humans. This is why newer systems don’t use the same abstractions (JavaScript and browser APIs), or else sandbox them much more thoroughly (iOS).

Those newer tools have newer problems, of course, but I think a lot of the churn and reinvention of tech that we complain about is really about trying to find abstractions that combine in more predictable and useful ways.

I think computer systems were always terrible (I think our brains were only ever able to properly/completely grok the old 8- and 16-bit microcomputers and early game consoles), but because early networks and computer systems were built almost entirely on a combination of naivete and lack of awareness on the part of the large corporations, the sysadmins of the day got free reign to do whatever they wanted however they wanted it, pretty much by default.

With no "here, please build this highly technical thing.... with management's help" boring into your back making you question your own every move, and a status quo (read: world market) that simply didn't understand what was possible and how quickly it could be accomplished, the technical scene of the 80s and 90s was largely owned by the sysadmins, free to run everything at whatever pace they liked. You can imagine that genuine motivation and interest in maintaining mastery of the craft flourished in such an environment. So of course people knew what they were doing.

Lines of respect were drawn. (And script kiddies learned where the "real" sysadmins were and stayed away - lest they be out-pwned.)

Today, everything runs far too quickly to get the remotest handle on which way is up, let alone a competent understanding of all the interactions between everything. At the same time, a lot of early default assumptions (eg, "UNIX is a universally good design, and C is the best universal programming language") are being thoroughly trounced because of scalability issues nobody would have dreamed of in 1994, and security issues that a bygone era was honestly too complacent to take seriously.

Incidentally, the vitriolic reaction to the introduction of systemd IMO makes for a good example of why conservatism is bad: when push came to shove, those same sysadmins that had free reign to go as fast - or as slow - as they wanted, had grown so complacent and non-proactive, they were unable to coherently a) band together and b) argue (showing the "workings-out", not just the solution) against a cause none believed in. Instead there was vitriol, death threats and a peanut gallery louder than a fireworks display. TL;DR, that era did not age well.

(Note that I do not give the example above as a point of "oooo, they're utterly incompetent and incapable of anything" or "80s = bad". Black-and-white-ness is not implied by there being only one datapoint.)