A word from Docebo’s Tech team
In the last few days developers and system admins the world over have been extremely busy keeping up with the latest news about the massive Amazon AWS reboot and the ShellShock Bash Bug.
Let’s start with the good news, our clients will not be affected at all because the actions taken by Amazon to fix this problem won’t affect our end users in any way.
Now let’s take a closer look at what happened!
Amazon AWS
Amazon was recently notified about a vulnerability that affected Xen, the virtualization tool over which the whole EC2 cloud server infrastructure was built on. This issue was not announced publicly, but will be disclosed on the 1st of October – for this reason Amazon decided to patch the affected EC2 before that date.
The solution, which will involve less than 10% of the running EC2, consists of rebooting some servers to apply the patches that will solve the issue; and the full process will take between 10 to 20 minutes per server.
Normally this would lead to downtime of services running on the server during the time of reboot.
Thanks to the current infrastructure of the Docebo (Enterprise Cloud Solution) ECS we are able to overcome this situation without having any downtime.
This is possibile because each ECS installation runs on multiple servers at the same time, in different “availability zones” (aka datacenters). This means that while Amazon reboots a datacenter, the Learning Management System (LMS) user traffic is managed by a different datacenter (obviously one that is working correctly) in order to keep the service available. (Source: Amazon )
ShellShock
The other big news of the week is the vulnerability found in Bash, a very popular UNIX / Linux command shell.
What is it?
Here’s a good explanation of what the Shellshock “Bash” bug is (from this post): “This bug, baptized “Shellshock” by Security Researchers, affects the Unix command shell “Bash,” which happens to be one of the most common applications in those systems. That includes any machine running Mac OS X or Linux.”
A note to Docebo LMS users
Docebo’s architecture is running on Linux, however since the necessary protection measures on the cloud infrastructure have already been taken according to best practices, our users can rest assured that there will be no disruption to service.
Yours in elearning,
Docebo Tech team