Managing operations in SaaS
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All deployments are automated thanks to our .
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.
All logs generated by Toucan’s applications are centralized in an . Toucan’s tech team can follow activity on these apps as well as any warnings and errors thanks to 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 .
Our log retention policy is about 8 weeks long in our , 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.
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…).
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
Benefits
This monitoring runs 24/7 and every alert is checked to ensure a fast reaction from the Toucan tech team.
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.
To discover new vulnerabilities and patch against them as quickly as possible, we follow:
Database
MongoDB
Database
MongoDB
Application
Python
Container
Docker
Container
Docker
System
Ubuntu
Ubuntu LTS packages
System
Ubuntu
System
Debian
System
InstallingfSense
Auto-updates
And Github's issues/announces of main projects we use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This support is open between 9:00 and 18:00 (Paris hour) during the working days.
We have a dedicated “on-call duty” team (level 1,2,3) at night and on weekends to watch and fix major issues.
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.
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.
Furthermore, we use to alert us to possible intrusions.
Our infrastructure and applications are continuously monitored by several external services (like , , or ).
As soon a security patch is available, we automatically applied it to our whole infrastructure by using our scripts.
Otherwise, our infrastructure is fully updated every 2 months with our . But before applying updates everywhere, we use a staging node to be sure there will be no regression.
Our main support channels are emails via .
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 on its infrastructure to monitor running containers and hosts in real-time.
Whenever detects a scenario that is not on the Toucan team’s whitelist, it sends an alert to the team.