When I was at Microsoft we took security cripplingly seriously to the point we could not deliver features and our competitors could because the security process was convoluted and had multiple reviews and approval steps.
Having crippling bureaucracy does not correlate with good security outcomes, except maybe negatively. However, having a history of unending egregious security failures, like Microsoft, does correlate with poor security outcomes. For that matter, having a present of unending egregious security failures also correlates with poor security outcomes.
I ran some stats on producthunt a few months ago, there are 22 times more daily SaaS launches now than in 2020, the AI impact on the industry is hard to fathom. The blog I wrote (AI-assisted) if you're curious: https://www.mahl.me/blog/product-hunt-is-swamped-now/
How these Paas (Railway before) are being breached? Poor choices or something else? Scary Nonetheless. I thought AI advancement will make the self hosting painful. If PaaS are no good, then what can be done?
Modern PaaS is tough because there's a general expectation that users (and agents) are able to see and read back environment variables in their management UI or CLI - which means that you can't segregate credential values from the public web environment. See e.g. the visibility icons on https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/secure/inject-sec...
And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.
Why would ai advancement make self hosting painful? Apart from increased cost of hardware (which you implicitly would pay for in PaaS as well anyways).
If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.
When you build something small, you can easily see all the doors and properly guard them.
As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.
Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.
Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.
This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.
The solution does not require any new magical tools.
There's no amount of "nicer to use" that can replace security, at least certainly when selling to enterprises
So, you can always say: Look, it’s not us (especially not my org!). It f’ing Microsoft/AWS. Everyone got hacked.
You and your career are gonna be fine.
Let us look on the front page and see if there are any, oh look here is one: https://www.binarysecurity.no/posts/2026/10/one-root-case
thats the crux; are you working for the paycheck, or for the truth?
could be both, but pretty much all "i was right" stories start with "everyone else said i was wrong"
And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that only re-encrypted versions are ever seen by the management/API web server. But fundamentally this display requirement means that if your management/API web server is compromised, users' secrets can be obtained by a process of impersonation.
If anything, AI makes running linux boxes much easier than 4 years ago; it's now faster and the learning cliff is gone to get the correct CLI commands and digging into system logs.
As you build something bigger and bigger, quickly, with several people building, guarding all the doors becomes exceptionally difficult without a kind of aggressive discipline which is contrary to the "go fast" culture.
Cybersecurity in practice until now, for most companies, has been an insurance problem, not a quality problem.
Such companies are quickly discovering that insurance is a post-hoc partial correction and not a proper solution.
This situation will not improve anytime soon for most companies.
The solution does not require any new magical tools.
If I go on wayback a few days, I can see Sentry: https://web.archive.org/web/20261026032756/https://northflan...