For GitHub, the world’s largest and most advanced developer collaboration platform serving more than 65 million users, provisioning infrastructure to support application development, coordinating microservices across various cloud environments, and keeping all the connections between them safe and secure is a monumental task.
The company’s homegrown secrets management system required manual custom configurations and code to connect hundreds of apps and services, all while managing the keys and secrets by hand. Any changes to the static secrets protecting the company’s services and applications meant changing and updating that secret in any of the myriad of systems that connected to it.
Other core activities like load balancing servers were similarly and exceptionally manual — and timeconsuming — endeavors that forced the team to create software that wrote out static configurations for every host available at a specific moment. If the team wanted to add service capacity or a new service, in some cases they first had to add a new configuration to a given load balancer, which could negatively impact teams across the organization.
