ADR-0004: Be Practically Secure

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Status: accepted
Date: 2024-05-11
Tags: guidelines, principles

Context and Problem Statement

Corollary: Do not be annoyingly secure.

Provide a delightful user experience while taking security seriously.

VMware Secrets Manager is a secure solution, yet still delightful to operate.

You won’t have to jump over the hoops or wake up in the middle of the night to keep it up and running.

Instead, VMware Secrets Manager will work seamlessly, as if it doesn’t exist at all.

Decision Drivers

Certain solutions out in the wild are hard to configure operate and maintain.
Security solutions are often seen as a hindrance to productivity.
A security solution can help DevOps, SREs, and security engineers instead of being a burden.

Considered Options

Be practically secure, and enable delightful user experience. Provide additional levels of security as optional features to those who need them.
Be annoyingly secure, maintenance-heavy, and hard to operate.

Decision Outcome

Chosen option: “option 1”, because we want DevOps teams to have a life.

Positive Consequences

Happy users.
Secure solution.
Less maintenance.
More time to focus on other things.
Ability to harden the solution when needed.

Negative Consequences

Those who need a more secure solution may need to enable additional features.

ADRs

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