Evergreen Development

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.

A short talk and discussion about using git hooks for enforcing
policies (e.g. disallowing upload of binary files, running lint, etc.)
will follow.

Please step up for food sponsorship ($75 only!; just hit up one of the organizers) so you and your fellow geeks can enjoy pizza and drinks