My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU’s digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
Because a security engineer focused on cloud would rightfully say “pod security is not my issue, I’m focused on protecting the rest of our world from each pod itself.”. With AWS as example: If they then analyze the IAM role structures and to deep into where the pod runs (e.g. shared ec2 vs eks) etc. then it would just be a matter of different focus.
Cloud security is focused on the infrastructure - looks like you’re looking for a security engineer focused on the dev side.
If they bring neither to the table then I’m with you - but I don’t see how “the cloud” is at fault here… especially for security the world as full of “following the script” people long before cloud was a thing.
I mean, the person in question had “hardening EKS” on their CV. EKS still means that the whole data plane is your responsibility. How can you harden a cluster without understanding the foundation of container security (isolation primitives, capabilities, etc.)? Workload security is very much part of the job.
I mean the moment some pod will need to run with some privilege (say, a log forwarder which gets host logs), and you need to “harden” the cluster, what do you do if you don’t understand the concept of capabilities? I will tell you what, because I asked this very question, and the answer was “copy the logs elsewhere”, which is the “make it work with the hammer solution” that again shows the damage of not understanding.
I am with you about different scopes, skillsets etc. But here we were interviewing people with a completely matching skillset on paper.
Oh yeah I see…
As some old philosopher once said: “shit’s fucked, yo”.
Seems to be appropriate here.