Some weeks in this project definitely have themes to them, and for me this week it feels that that theme has been documentation. As I said last week, we know there are gaps in our documentation, and that it mostly exists – but it’s in our heads and practices, or not properly codified in a single, easily-available document. So this week, as people have spare time, we’ve been writing documentation for the Playbook. I’ve even done some of it myself. There is a lot more to do yet, but you can check our progress. Thank you, Stuart, for the inspiration and motivation.
We are rapidly (yet it feels oddly slowly, at times) reaching v1.0 of our platform. Following the rebuild of the firewalls, we have been able to deploy Panorama to manage them. This will hopefully be the last major piece of work on the firewalls for a little while. There is one ongoing piece of work though, to set up authentication groups on Globalprotect to give more granular permissions. This is proving a little more difficult than expected, but we have a solution to test.
Account migrations rumble on; we had of course expected to have finished this work a couple of weeks ago. There’s not been much progress since last week, though we have started looking at the Websites account, and working out if it would be better to host the WordPress instances in containers instead of on EC2s.
We have the necessary changes for e5 lined up with Advanced, and should be able to move that account and attach its new VPN next week. However, we are stuck on the Housing accounts due to competing priorities in MTFH. We anticipate that that will be resolved next week, and this will in turn unblock the move of the API accounts.
And then… we start iterating.
For now, though, there’s also been a lot of support work this week. We’ve supported the Security Assurance team with their work, and created an EC2 for the new Canon Uniflow scanning service. We continue to iterate our GitHub policies, and are providing advice and guidance to several teams. We’ve also just enabled something called Compute Optimiser, which scans our entire estate to identify any Compute resources that are over- or under-provisioned.
Dare I say things are starting to settle and mature?
