Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, yes. Another blog post about a revolutionary new security feature. My PagerDuty app just started vibrating nervously in my pocket. It knows what's coming. While the marketing team is high-fiving over coining the term "Ghosting," I'm over here trying to figure out which holiday weekend this thing is going to incinerate.
Let's break down this masterpiece of future operational pain, shall we?
First off, this magical detection of a "gap between process creation and notification" sounds wonderful. It also sounds exactly like a fantastically resource-hungry agent that we're supposed to deploy everywhere. I can't wait to see the presentation that promises 'negligible performance overhead' right before I watch it add 200ms of latency to every container startup and consume more CPU than the actual application it's supposed to be protecting.
I'm already picturing the firehose of false positives. Get ready for 4 AM alerts because a legitimate, scheduled cron job that cleans up temp files gets flagged as a potential Herpaderping event. I'll spend an hour of my life I'll never get back, bleary-eyed and clutching a cold coffee, only to discover our own backup script is now considered a high-severity threat. The 'A' in 'AI' stands for 'Alert fatigue'.
My absolute favorite part of any new, "essential" security layer is how we're supposed to monitor the monitor. What happens when this thing silently fails? Is there a metric that screams "The thing watching the things is no longer watching"? Of course not. We'll find out it’s been dead for three weeks after an actual incident, and the post-mortem will have a lovely little bullet point about the "Ghosting" detector having, ironically, become a ghost itself.
You can sell us on all the cleverly-named attack vectors you want. It's not the Doppelgängers or the Herpaderps that are going to bring us down. Let me tell you what will happen: this new agent will have a subtle memory leak tied to kernel version 4.18.x on Debian. It will run perfectly for two months, and then, at 3:00 AM on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, it will consume all available memory on a critical database host, trigger an OOM kill on the primary node, and cause a cascading failure of the entire cluster. The real process tampering will be me frantically typing systemctl disable elastic-agent to bring the service back online.
You know, this all sounds very impressive. It'll look great on a slide deck. We'll probably even get a few free t-shirts and a sticker for the PoC. It'll go right on my laptop lid, next to my faded stickers from InfluxDB, RethinkDB, and that "un-crashable" distributed SQL database from 2017 whose name I can't even remember. They all promised a revolution, too.
Anyway, I need to go pre-emptively add another 100GB to the logging cluster's disk volume. Sigh.