AWS in Government: myths, risks, and misconceptions

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Digital Transformation Office AWS in government: Risks, myths, and misconceptions Lindsay Holmwood Head of Development @auxesis dto.gov.au

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dto.gov.au Digital Transformation Office

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dto.gov.au We're here to make government services simpler, clearer and faster for everyone

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dto.gov.au 1/ We collaborate with agencies to transform services so that they meet user needs

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dto.gov.au 2/ We create whole-of-government platforms to support service transformation

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dto.gov.au 3/ We develop policies and standards to help government transform services consistently

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dto.gov.au We run EVERYTHING on AWS

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dto.gov.au Dev & Staging & QA & Production

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dto.gov.au Myths

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dto.gov.au “We can’t store data securely”

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dto.gov.au On ASD’s CCSL

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dto.gov.au EBS + EC2 + S3 + VPC You can run a lot of workloads on this.

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dto.gov.au ASD acknowledges risks of in-house systems

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dto.gov.au “Organisations need to perform a risk assessment and implement associated mitigations before using cloud services.” – Cloud Computer Security For Tenants, ASD

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dto.gov.au “Risks vary depending on factors such as the sensitivity and criticality of data to be stored or processed, how the cloud service is implemented and managed, how the organisation intends to use the cloud service, and challenges associated with the organisation performing timely incident detection and response.” – Cloud Computer Security For Tenants, ASD

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dto.gov.au “Organisations need to compare these risks against an objective risk assessment of using in-house computer systems which might: be poorly secured; have inadequate availability; or, be unable to meet modern business requirements.”” – Cloud Computer Security For Tenants, ASD

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dto.gov.au Please read: Cloud Computing Security for Tenants http://www.asd.gov.au/publications/protect/Cloud_Computing_Security_for_Tenants.pdf

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dto.gov.au There are strategies for making data available on AWS

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dto.gov.au id name email medicare Protected row ❌ Can’t store this on AWS

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dto.gov.au id name email medicare Unclassified columns ✅ Can store this on AWS

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dto.gov.au

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dto.gov.au Misconceptions

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dto.gov.au “We’ll run it like physical infrastructure”

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dto.gov.au *buy RIs for 3 years*

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dto.gov.au Yes, you’ll get a cost saving

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dto.gov.au BUT

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dto.gov.au Value of AWS is not low cost compute

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dto.gov.au Value of AWS is on-tap capacity

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dto.gov.au We can’t extract this value unless we build and run services like AWS recommends

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dto.gov.au We have to think differently about our architecture

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dto.gov.au Buying RIs is a risk if you don’t know your workloads

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dto.gov.au You don’t know what your workloads are going to be 3 years from now

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dto.gov.au You might: Optimise your code to run in parallel, across many cheaper instances

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dto.gov.au You might: Shift your workloads to spot instances, for on-demand calculations

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dto.gov.au How to control spend:

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dto.gov.au How to control spend: Start with on-demand instances

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dto.gov.au How to control spend: Track your spend over multiple months, identify instance types that are constantly used

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dto.gov.au How to control spend: Then buy RIs for a year

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dto.gov.au How to control spend: If you’re really keen, go for 3 years

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dto.gov.au You don’t know what your workloads are going to be 3 years from now

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dto.gov.au How to control spend: Sell unused RIs on the marketplace

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dto.gov.au Risks

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dto.gov.au “Our spend is getting out of control!”

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dto.gov.au Use sub accounts to segment and control spend

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dto.gov.au Logically separate services you’re delivering across accounts

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dto.gov.au See costs in one place

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dto.gov.au Reduce your cost by buying RIs and using blended rates

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dto.gov.au Handy when the service is mogged

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dto.gov.au Automatically shut down environments every night

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dto.gov.au Encourages a culture of technical resilience

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dto.gov.au Better security posture through short lived environments

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dto.gov.au *attackers are getting faster

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dto.gov.au “Our stuff is getting hacked!”

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dto.gov.au We can’t extract value from AWS unless we build and run services like AWS recommends

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dto.gov.au Extract maximum value by giving your developers AWS access

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dto.gov.au Give them the power to create & update & destroy their own environments

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dto.gov.au Encourages a culture of technical resilience

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dto.gov.au Heavily use IAM users, roles, and groups

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dto.gov.au BUT

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dto.gov.au Services and data can be accidentally exposed to the world

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No content

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dto.gov.au Regularly & automatically audit exposed services

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dto.gov.au “We aren’t getting the reliability benefits!”

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dto.gov.au We can’t extract this value unless we build and run services like AWS recommends

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dto.gov.au Build highly reliable systems from unreliable components

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dto.gov.au Use autoscaling groups heavily

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dto.gov.au Pre-bake your applications into images

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dto.gov.au

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dto.gov.au Build a strong continuous delivery capability

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deploy to production acceptance tests integrate unit tests code done Traditional delivery Manual Manual Manual Auto

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deploy to production acceptance tests integrate unit tests code done Continuous Delivery Manual Auto Auto Auto

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deploy to production acceptance tests integrate unit tests code done Continuous Deployment Auto Auto Auto Auto

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dto.gov.au Everything goes to production through the pipeline

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30 60 90 120 2015-10-29 2015-11-08 2015-11-16 2015-11-25 GOV.AU deploys over time

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dto.gov.au Releases are a non-event

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smoke tests acceptance tests integrate code done environment change deploy to production build images

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dto.gov.au Satisfy regulatory requirements more easily

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dto.gov.au Get scalability for free

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ASG environment application image instance instance instance instance instance ELB

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dto.gov.au Heavily restrict automation’s access with IAM

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dto.gov.au Ship all logs off site

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dto.gov.au Check out Packer & Terraform

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dto.gov.au Case study cloud.gov.au outage

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dto.gov.au

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dto.gov.au Time to detection: 4 minutes

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dto.gov.au Time to recovery: 12 minutes

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dto.gov.au Human intervention: 0

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dto.gov.au The system self-healed

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dto.gov.au Took longer than if we were using pure-AWS

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dto.gov.au It’s a tradeoff we’re willing to accept for multi-cloud capability

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dto.gov.au Principles are the same

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dto.gov.au The opportunity is immense

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dto.gov.au IaaS helps make doing the right thing easy

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dto.gov.au Technology is cheap, people are dear

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dto.gov.au IaaS eliminates classes of problems

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dto.gov.au IaaS frees up your teams to focus on the bigger picture

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dto.gov.au Free people up to help org learn

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dto.gov.au Australia can become the best in the world at delivering clearer, simpler, faster government services.

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dto.gov.au Thank you! ❤ the talk? Let @auxesis & @DTO know!