Your instances safe from MongoDB Apocalypse on the Platform.sh PaaS

You might have heard about the MongoDB scare with titles like: MongoDB Apocalypse Is Here as Ransom Attacks Hit 10,000 Servers!

Rest assured, your MongoDB instances are safe and sound if they are running on Platform.sh. And this is a very strong argument to why our architecture is superior to other PaaS providers.

Unlike other providers, with Platform.sh all the services you use are inside the managed cluster and included in the plan’s price. These are not outside services that expose application ports on the internet. This is what allows us to clone entire clusters, this is what allows us to offer a 99.99% SLA on the entire stack for our enterprise offering, but this is also a security feature.

Each cluster has only two ways in: HTTP or SSH. Our entrypoints simply will not answer anything else.

Your application containers in the cluster have direct connectivity to the service containers, but this happens on a non-routable IP class. There is simply no possible way for the exterior world to access a service directly. And if you are running (in micro-service style) multiple services in the cluster you can even control which has access to which services through the relationships key in your .platform.app.yaml file. Because secure by default makes sense to us.

If you want to connect to a MongoDB instance from the exterior (to run for example an admin interface) you can still do it! But the only way to connect is through an SSH tunnel that relies on your private SSH key (platform tunnel:open on the command line will do the trick). You get all the benefits, all the ease of use of running a modern stack, but none of the hassle and risks of running a patchwork of services.

With Platform.sh you can be WebScale and secure!