Developer access to production systems? Sure! (sometimes)
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Interesting blog entry on
serverfault.com about whether and when to grant developer access to production systems.
It’s a good read - if you’re a developer or an admin - go read it.
The one thing I can add to the discussion is simply this: it’s not an all-or-nothing question. It’s reasonable, for example, to grant developers admin-level access to a production system in the context of resolving an emergency outage, or troubleshooting a hard-to-find problem, or performing a complicated version upgrade, or even as backup resources if all the normal admins are unavailable (home sick, etc.).
Operationally, it’s pretty straightforward to do that using a privileged password management system. That’s because PPM systems randomize passwords regularly (e.g., daily or even more often), so giving a developer the admin password to a production system does not imply that he’ll still know it tomorrow, or even that he’ll know the admin password for some other systems. A PPM system can also be used for workflow authorization of the temporary access grant, audit logs, etc.