⚙️Managing operations in SaaS

Deployments

All deployments are automated thanks to our Ansible playbooks.

All our playbooks are versioned, maintained and reviewed by the Toucan tech team.

Benefits

As a best practice, we never directly connect to a Toucan node in order to run manual commands. We reduce the risk of human error and deployment is able to auto-scale.

Log Management

All logs generated by Toucan’s applications are centralized in an Elastic stack. Toucan’s tech team can follow activity on these apps as well as any warnings and errors thanks to Kibana dashboards.

We also have a centralized system logs management which consolidates all our logs (e.g.: syslog, auth, nginx access/error, security tools…). We are able to detect brute force attacks, spam and malicious behavior on our dashboards. For each detected pattern, we receive automated alerts thanks to Elastalert.

Our log retention policy is about 8 weeks long in our Elastic stack, but we keep - by default - 14 weeks of web access/error logs and 52 weeks of app logs in our servers.

Benefits

As a best practice, we never need to directly connect to a Toucan node to follow activity and logs. This is at the core of our ability to scale our monitoring.

Vulnerability Scans

We regularly and automatically scan our servers in search for:

• open ports

• misconfiguration

• lack of security updates

Benefits

We ensure having an up-to-date environment (system, security, patches…).

Alerts

Our monitoring services alert us when:

• a server becomes unresponsive

• a server shows unusual CPU, memory or disk activity

• a server is getting closer to its hardware limits

• an application status page shows that it’s not OK

• one of the following ports is not listening: 443/80/22

Furthermore, we use OSSEC to alert us to possible intrusions.

Benefits

This monitoring runs 24/7 and every alert is checked to ensure a fast reaction from the Toucan tech team.

Performance Monitoring

Our infrastructure and applications are continuously monitored by several external services (like NewRelic, Sentry, StatusCake or BetterUptime).

Every week these services send us detailed performance and uptime reports.

Benefits

These regular reports help us to identify potential regressions or bottlenecks that can then be fixed.

Watch and patch management

To discover new vulnerabilities and patch against them as quickly as possible, we follow:

Item	Name	Descriptif
Database	MongoDB	Mongo CVE DAdministration, exploitation & internal security details
Database	MongoDB	Mongo Security Checklist
Application	Python	Python CvAdministration, exploitation & internal security Database
Container	Docker	Docker Dev Mailing list
Container	Docker	Docker User Mailing list
System	Ubuntu	Ubuntu LTS packages
System	Ubuntu	Ubuntu Security List
System	Debian	Debian Security List
System	InstallingfSense	Auto-updates

And Github's issues/announces of main projects we use.

As soon a security patch is available, we automatically applied it to our whole infrastructure by using our Ansible scripts.

Otherwise, our infrastructure is fully updated every 2 months with our Ansible playbooks. But before applying updates everywhere, we use a staging node to be sure there will be no regression.

These update processes can very occasionally lead to a short downtime that we do out of office hours.

If the infrastructure or the applications are impacted by a known vulnerability, we always send a mail report to the client to warn and explain how we recover it.

Backups

We run a daily backup process for each instance/project.

The backup is a complete snapshot which is encrypted by a GPG key (dedicated to the instance/project) and exported over rsync+ssh to our exclusive backup nodes.

GPG keys are only available to the Toucan’s admins and stored in our passwords manager system.

All the backups are exported to dedicated storage service.

By default we keep a retention of 20 daily backups for each instance/project.

Benefits

We also regularly test and challenge our backup and restoration scripts.

Restoring an instance or a project is a fully automated and fast process.

Issues logbook

By culture, we keep a logbook of every issue on the infrastructure.

Each logbook entry describes:

• what’s going on

• how did we understand the issue

• what did we do to solve the problem

• what are the impacts

• what do we need to do to avoid it next times

Benefits

The logbook is open to every Toucan employees. The knowledge, about the life and the issues on the infrastructure, is shared and maintained by every one.

Communication during issues

As soon as we detect an issue, your dedicated account manager and/or client success manager will contact you to explain the issue, the potential impacts and give you an estimated resolution time.

When the issue is closed, you can expect a post-mortem report, mainly extracted from our logbook (cf previous paragraph), with details about the investigation and the resolution process.

This emergency communication is available 24x7.

Your instance has a dedicated status page at the following URL {instance-name}.status.toucantoco.com on which you can check the status of the services, find information about scheduled maintenances and consult incident reports. You can subscribe to this page by email in order to receive updates.

Support

Our main support channels are emails via [e-mail].

This support is open between 9:00 and 18:00 (Paris hour) during the working days.

On-Call duty team

We have a dedicated “on-call duty” team (level 1,2,3) at night and on weekends to watch and fix major issues.

Project instance and server decommission

Each time we need to decommission a project instance:

• the dedicated stack is shutdown (virtual hosts, API process, workers, queue server, database)

• all data, logs and associated configuration are erased

Each time we need to decommission a server:

• data and home partition are fully formatted

• we force a basic rewrite of the partition (with a basic dd command), thus no block could be restored from their previous state

• then we release the server to Scaleway.

Benefits

A decommissioned server is always left without any data.

We have exactly the same approach for any SAN or storage volumes.

Container runtime security monitoring

To ensure that our customer’s instances are not compromised while running and detect any suspicious behavior which can lead to security issue, Toucan uses Falco on its infrastructure to monitor running containers and hosts in real-time.

Whenever Falco detects a scenario that is not on the Toucan team’s whitelist, it sends an alert to the team.

Here are some examples of suspicious activities:

• RCE (Remote Code Execution) inside a container.

• Package installation during the runtime of a container.

• Shell binding to a suspicious file descriptor.

• Netcat Program runs inside a container that allows remote code execution.