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Backing up Auth0 to GitHub using AWS Lambda
Typically, you first learn the importance of backups when you don’t have one. For me, this happened on an HP C110. I was working at Motorola and configuring a Unix host for a test install of the software we were shipping to customers. I had completed the install, was checking on few things, then I removed the installation directory.
rm -rf .Only, I wasn’t in the installation directory, I was in /usr. After becoming very familiar with the primitives available in /bin/sh as all my normal commands like ls were gone. I was able to restore the machine by transfering the binaries from another machine. HP-UX had a /usr/sbin directory with several binaries like chmod and ftp that allowed me to fix my mistake, but a backup would have been much easier.
I’m always thinking about that third leg of the security triad, availability. At my company, we use Auth0 for authentication. After configuring several applications to use Auth0 for SSO, I realized how complicated it would be to recreate all the configuration. I’m also mindful that human error continues to be the number one cause of outages and not having a strategy for remediation can increase outage times.
