DeveloperWeek 2020

Recent innovations in open source software orchestration tools (e.g. Kubernetes, Terraform), and widespread adoption of the SRE model, have democratized a path for reliable online services. We'll explore what these changes are about, how to take advantage of them, and what this means for the shape of existing and new business in the coming years.

We'll discuss a development model called evergreen development, which relies on the capabilities these social and technical tools unlock. Evergreen uses simple, proven, and principled methods to reduce attack surfaces organization-wide. Standardized build pipelines, rapidly building immutable images that are automatically pinned to the latest stable version, can turn dependency drift from a hard-to-manage problem into an expected (and easily managed) exception. By defaulting builds to using the latest available version, security patches are more regularly deployed to production. Since the vast majority of exploits are known ones, this common sense approach can mitigate or prevent a wide variety of attacks.

We'll also discuss the non-security aspects of evergreen development, and how those might help pioneer this style of development at your organization.