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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

A bit off-topic, but I had the same thought when I read about Jenkins servers on the public Internet in this piece.[0]

But when I read that he had found a public facing Jenkins server owned by Google, I figured I must be missing something.

I run a 2 man shop, but I still keep things like Jenkins behind OpenVPN. Why would anyone leave Jenkins open? There must be a reason, right?

https://emtunc.org/blog/01/2018/research-misconfigured-jenki... [0]

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Google's "Beyond Corp" initiative [1] discourages trusted networks and VPNs in favor of secure services on public networks. By trusting the network to provide a level of security, you are more likely to be vulnerable to escalation attacks by bad actors that are able to access your private networks. You're also more likely to encourage legitimate users to set up workarounds that result in secure network breaches. Typically they use an Identity aware proxy in front of the service, but services can have a public view as well.

To answer your second question, I work for an open source non-profit software company, and we run some of our jenkins servers, which do continuous integration builds, publicly available so that community contributors and users can see build failures. Google has a number of open source projects that probably have similar goals.

1. https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp/

Many open-source applications (especially Java-based) use a public-facing Jenkins server for running and distributing nightly and PR builds. Nowadays, this is usually handled by hosted CI (Travis or GitLab), but there are still some who prefer good old Jenkins.

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