Ben and Ryan Show Episode 5

In this episode, your hosts Ben Nadel and Ryan Brown are joined by xByte Cloud Chief Technology Officer, Dakota Clum, to double click into cloud hosting.

What are people doing to deploy dev code into cloud hosted servers

• RDP and make file changes directly on server

• FTP and apply updates to files one at time

• Azure DevOps - CI/CD (being adopted more)

• Agent can be deployed and have code deployed to traditional VPS

Load balancing on clusters

• Cloud based NAS shared storage between cloud servers

• Master - child replication

• SQL can load balance synchronization

• SQL can do active/passive for geo-failover

• Load balacing web servers needed before SQL needed most of the time

Deployment strategies

• Tradeoffs between efficiency and risk appetite

• You can evolve your processes over time

• No right or wrong answer

Scaling

• Depends on your needs

• Possible to run into issues where nodes not available on AWS

• Need to do reserved instances to get performance needs

• If you can predict when you need more load, you can do short term scaled servers

• Determine what needs scaled instead of entire application - or offload these to a separate service

Risk Appetite

• DR options - is it ok to be down for 15 minutes

• Cost of going from 4 9's of availability versus 5 9's

• For smaller deployments, do you need a separate dev server - non 0% chance that dev takes down production

Shared Hosting

• You get a website

• Share all RAM, CPU, Disk with everyone

• Noisy neighbor can take you down

• Generally shared hosting don't allow support for all ColdFusion hotfixes

• If just HTML files, it may not be an issue compared to also needing SQL

• Risk appetite of noisy neighbors

Most Common Security Issues We Have Seen In Other Environments

• Supporting file types not needed by your app allowing PHP executions

• Too many ports open exposing attack vectors

• SQL Injection when form input not sanitized

• File upload to default directories (don't use /upload)

• Allowing file executions in upload directories