“Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job”
Wow, that headline grabbed my attention.
Earlier this week you may have seen an article reported by The Register about a post in reddit from a junior software developer going by the name of “cscareerthrowaway567”, who on his/her first day destroyed a Production database and lost their job.
I was basically given a document detailing how to setup my local development environment. Which involves run a small script to create my own personal DB instance from some test data. After running the command i was supposed to copy the database url/password/username outputted by the command and configure my dev environment to point to that database. Unfortunately instead of copying the values outputted by the tool, i instead for whatever reason used the values the document had.
Unfortunately apparently those values were actually for the production database (why they are documented in the dev setup guide i have no idea). Then from my understanding that the tests add fake data, and clear existing data between test runs which basically cleared all the data from the production database. Honestly i had no idea what i did and it wasn’t about 30 or so minutes after did someone actually figure out/realize what i did.
Now, we can not be sure if the story by “cscareerthrowaway567” is true or not but it does provide an great example of the potential dangers of manual database cloning.
The story raises many issues around process, security, change management, training and not least why someone thought it was a good idea to include Production account details in a database cloning document ?
However, this could have easily been avoided through the use of Automation or a CDM (Copy Data Management) tools e.g. Catalogic, Actifio, Delphix etc..
Many modern All-Flash Arrays (AFA) provide powerful REST API’s which can be called from various programming and scripting languages e.g. Python, Java, Perl, PowerShell etc… to create custom solutions.
AFA Storage API’s can also be consumed by DevOPS Automation and Provisioning software e.g. Ansible, Chef, Puppet etc.. to provide full-stack or end-to-end Automation of Database Cloning, improving security and also removing the chance of human error.
Check out the Pure Storage Developer Community area for code examples.
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