Why STUPS?

STUPS was created with a specific organization setup in mind:

  • teams are first class citizens in the organization
  • teams are self-organized
  • all team members have equal rights
  • teams are autonomous and can choose technologies as they think fit
  • “team” is the main entity for ownership and security boundaries

This leads to choosing the one AWS account per team setup, because:

  • AWS IAM policies do not properly constrain teams to only their resources in one big AWS account [1]
  • AWS service limits do not allow independent teams to work isolated in one big AWS account [2]

This setup requires tooling to foster team autonomy while complying with company regulations:

  • multiple AWS accounts need to be easily manageable
  • compliance rules dictate that all changes to production systems need to be audited (“traceability”)
  • applications need to have a secure way of communicating with each other across AWS accounts

The STUPS platform was created to facilitate the one AWS account per team setup and make the setup audit compliant:

  • multiple AWS accounts can be configured by a single tool (Seven Seconds)
  • transparency across AWS accounts is provided by a reporting tool (fullstop.)
  • traceability of changes is ensured
  • applications are secured via OAuth (mint & berry)

Traceability

How to trace software changes from a running EC2 instance back to the specification:

  • The running EC2 instance (running Taupage AMI) can be queried for its user data.
  • The Taupage user data YAML contains the Docker image (immutable in Pier One) and the application ID
  • The Docker image contains the SCM source information via scm-source.json. Pier One provides a special REST endpoint to retrieve the SCM source information for any conforming Docker image.
  • The Kio application registry contains either the specification for the application directly or the used ticket system.
  • The SCM commit references specification tickets from the configured ticket system (if a ticket system is used)
How STUPS ensures that software changes can be traced back
[1]Not all AWS services/products are properly integrated with IAM, e.g. the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) service only allows global granting of ELB creation.
[2]Team B might hit AWS service limits for production applications because team A spun up too many instances for performance testing.