Should Developers Have Access To Production?

WHiTe VaMPiRe writes "Kyle Brandt recently wrote an editorial exploring the implications of providing developers access to the production servers of a Web site. He explores the risk introduced by providing higher level access as well as potential compromise solutions."

Comments

Read-only, if that, and nothing more.

[Junior J. Junior III]

If you want to have control over your production code, you need to have assurance that it is not changing in an uncontrolled fashion. Allowing developers to have access to production locations makes it all too easy for this to happen. Read-only access allows developers to see the running code and perform file comparisons which can be useful in troubleshooting. They should never need more than this.

And in some cases, even read access can be risky -- I've seen production web sites with resources linking back to development server URIs. It's a good idea to firewall your production servers in such a way that it is not possible for them to reach resources on development servers. This shouldn't prevent developers from being able to read the files on the production server, though.

Re:For me

[TheRaven64]

Depends on how your deployment system is designed. Mainline Xen now has support for brining up complete live duplicates of a running VM and keeping them in sync (or letting them diverge), and this support has been in high-availability hypervisors for decades. If you're using a system like this, it's just a couple of commands to clone the production VM and get something that you can break without impacting users.