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Comment by agwa | Hacker News Reader

This incident makes me think that services like Redis should support running with two sets of credentials at once in order to facilitate credential rolling. As it currently stands, rolling credentials is a rather big deal with a chance of things going wrong in the process.

Aside: the text on that page is extremely difficult to read because of poor contrast (#8584B2 on #282936) and might be impossible for people with vision impairment. If anyone from Heroku is reading, you should change the color scheme to be compliant with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. See: http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

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I thought the exact same thing, but then I realized that we don’t need Redis to actually support a choice of two passwords for a single account. Rather, clients can be configured with a list of credentials to try. When rolling credentials over, simply add the new ones to the clients’ lists, update the service, then remove the old ones from the clients. Then you can wait hours or days between steps for safety, and there is no time when system reliability is degraded by a service instance being inaccessible.

That's pushing complexity back onto app devs. Functionality like that is best solved once in the database for everyone.

To your aside: I for one really appreciate Heroku's color scheme. I find high contrast color schemes very fatiguing, and prefer light-ish on dark-ish color schemes like Heroku's. I don't really believe in a universally ideal color scheme. I think we should instead focus on building and supporting tooling to help people adapt content to their needs.

Anyone with serious visual impairments almost certainly already has a user stylesheet installed in their browser of choice.

I am a person with reasonably decent vision who is fatigued by high-contrast color schemes. I greatly appreciate grey-on-black and other such color schemes that make it so I'm not staring into a lightbulb for ten-to-twelve hours a day. (Yes, my monitor brightness is set to a reasonable level. Yes, black on white is still far more fatiguing than white on black.)

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