Quien soy?

• Python engineer at National Journal
• Former government cybersecurity auditor
• Classic computing aficionado
• Spanish student

Our Agenda

• Deploy gracefully
• Secure servers
• Segment environments
• Scale the environment
• Gotchas
• Tools

Deploy: What Most of Us Do

• Just do what Heroku says (good!)
• git pulls / Fabric
• FTP
• Continuous

Deploy: Recommendations

• Aim for a single, repeatable, easy-to-execute deploy step
• Example: we `git force checkout` as part of a production push.
• Scheduled versus continuous is heavily influenced by discipline and politics

note: we use scheduled because it helps us adhere to the social contract we have with our organization.

Secure: What Most of Us Do

• Trust the hosting provider
• Developers have root access and app superuser access
• Diligently change our passwords every 90 days

Secure: Recommendations

• Keep sensitive data off of your public servers as much as possible
• Restrict everyone's access, *especially* developers
  • developers know just enough to get themselves and the server into trouble
  • the larger the attack surface, the higher the risk
• Contingency plans on contingency plans
• Bring non-devs into the risk analysis
• If running multiple apps off same server, run them with users that can only see their own directories

Segment: What Most of Us Do

• "my local machine is dev"
• "the server I push to is prod"

Segment: Recommendations

• dev (copy of prod environment) / stage / production
• subsegment production based on data classification

Scale: What Most of Us Do

• Just do what Heroku says (good!)
• Handle it when it becomes a problem (bad!)

Scale: Recommendations

Gotchas

• Storing images locally
• Django admin
• Out of control queries

Out of control queries

				
# Bad
def lots_of_queries(self):
	members = Members.objects.filter(committee='Ways and Means')
	for member in members:
		# this is a new DB query
		# each iteration
		chief_of_staff = member.chief_of_staff
		print(chief_of_staff.name)
	return members

# Good
def few_queries(self):
	members = Members.objects.filter(committee='Ways and Means')
	# yay
	members = members.select_related('chief_of_staff')
	for member in members:
		chief_of_staff = member.chief_of_staff
		print(chief_of_staff.name)
				
				

Tools

• Django Debug Toolbar
• New Relic
• Sentry
• Supervisor
• Flower

Django Debug Toolbar

New Relic

Sentry

Supervisor

Flower

Gracias!