Checklist for Onboarding Jessica

[hursey013]

New Engineer Onboarding Checklist

Special Notes

• Do not create this issue until the System Owner has formally authorized and requested it.. You can get that OK by one of two ways:
  • A:
  • [ ] A: System Owner creates this issue
  • B:
  • [x] B.1: System owner emails cloud-gov-compliance@gsa.gov and cloud-gov-operations@gsa.gov with their authorization
  • [ ] B.2: An operator adds a link to the Google Group conversation that includes the authorizing email.
• Please only use first names.

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In order to get Jessica productively contributing to the cloud.gov team, Brian should help Jessica complete a prescribed set of tasks that will bring them up to speed and get them setup with cloud.gov.

Instructions

1. Try to go through the checklists in order.
2. If Brian can’t complete any of the items on their checklist personally, they are responsible for ensuring that someone with the correct access completes that item.

Required items for all team members

These items help us fulfill security and compliance requirements (including for FedRAMP). If you get stuck, or if these requirements are confusing, ask for help from your buddy or in a cloud.gov channel.

• [ ] Take judicious notes on what about this onboarding process or cloud.gov is confusing or frustrating. If you notice a problem (especially with things like documentation), you are more than welcome to fix it! At the very least, please share this information with your onboarding buddy (or someone) at some point so we can make the team/platform better. (You can also file issues and pull requests on the template Onboarding checklist.
• [x] Be sure to introduce yourself and follow up with your onboarding buddy (they should have reached out to you at this point; if they haven't, please let the team know) and make sure this issue is assigned to them in our Github Project Planning Board. We use this board to organize, prioritize, and track our work.

Pre-requisites

• [x] Complete GSA OLU IT Security & Privacy Awareness Training, which includes accepting the GSA IT Rules of Behavior. This is required before we can give you access to any cloud.gov systems. If you joined GSA more than two months ago, you've already completed this task and can check the box.

Fulfill security and compliance requirements (including for FedRAMP) - Completed by onboarding buddy

• [ ] Make sure they're in the Team Roster.
• [ ] Add their name, whether they're Cloud Operations, and the date they joined the team to the training tracker.
  • Copy the formulas for the due dates from an existing row (grab the "corner" of the cells and pull down).
  • As they complete training, fill out their completion dates in the training tracker.
• [ ] Add them to the @cloud-gov-team in Slack’s Team Directory.
• [ ] Inform them of recurring cloud.gov meetings that are relevant for them in the team calendar (they will get access to this when added to the cloud.gov Team Google Group).
• [ ] Add them on GitHub to the cloud-gov-team team, which will automatically invite them to our cloud-gov organization.

Complete cloud.gov trainings

Onboarding buddy: Contact the compliance team in #cg-compliance to schedule training(s).

All team members:

• [ ] Coordinate with your onboarding buddy to schedule nonpublic information training within 60 days of joining the team (and annually after that). This will cover the following documents, which you should also review before or after training:
  • [x] Review the cloud.gov open source policy guidance about protecting sensitive information.
  • [x] Read our sharing secret keys policy.
  • [x] Review the TTS requirements for password management.

Federal employees and staff contractors, expand this section:

Engineers who are federal employees and staff contractors have a Contingency Plan role and may participate in Incident Response, so they must complete the CP and IR trainings. Project contractors do not need to complete these trainings. Check one of the following: - [ ] Coordinate with your onboarding buddy to schedule Contingency Planning training within 60 days. (and annually after that). This will cover the following document, which you should also review before or after training: - [x] Read the [Contingency Plan](https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/contingency-plan/). - [ ] Coordinate with your onboarding buddy to schedule [Incident Response Training](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AZjQE8zBzMRWZIFUuJPkJLted1ykGtALrLPoPRx5Vls/edit#slide=id.p) within 60 days of joining the team (and annually after that). This will cover the following document, which you should also review before or after training: - [x] Read the [Incident Response Guide](https://cloud.gov/docs/ops/security-ir/).

Learn more policies and procedures

In addition to the topics in the trainings section, review the following documents:

• [x] Read the Continuous Monitoring Strategy, particularly the cloud.gov team responsibilities.
• [x] Read the Configuration Management Plan.
• [x] Read the cloud.gov Security Policies and Procedures. These documents explain the high-level policies and procedures we must comply with while running cloud.gov, sorted into security control "families" They explain that we follow GSA IT security policy, and they provide a summary of the procedures in our System Security Plan.
• [x] Review the System Security Plan (the latest version lives on Google Drive; look for "cloud.gov System Security Plan (SSP)" as a .docx file). Of particular note for onboarding: Section 9 (System Description) and Section 10 (System Environment)
• [ ] Review the team's Engineering Practices. Some of these are mandatory because they fulfill FedRAMP requirements.

Getting to know cloud.gov

These items will help you come up to speed on cloud.gov and what it is, how it works, why it exists, etc. While you should take the time to go through them, please do not try and tackle it all in one shot! It can become overwhelming very quickly, so your onboarding buddy will walk through this list with you at a high level with you to help manage the work.

Resources on cloud.gov:

• [x] View the video: A Technical Overview of cloud.gov
• [x] Read the team onboarding document for more context about cloud.gov.
• [x] Bookmark the pertinent links listed here.
• [x] Read through the Overview section of our site for a broader understanding of cloud.gov, especially how we present it to potential customers and users.
• [x] Read the Delivery Process document to learn about how we work.
• [x] Read our service disruption guide to learn how we handle customer-facing service disruptions.

Resources on CloudFoundry/BOSH:

• [ ] Look at Opensourced content for cloud foundry training classes: zero to hero (beginner), bosh/operator, and microservices
• [ ] Here is some training materials: GitHub - CloudCredo/training-operating-the-foundry: Training materials for Operating a Platform: BOSH and Everything Else
• [ ] Very thorough documentation on BOSH: Ultimate Guide to BOSH
• [ ] BOSH 101 presentation recording and slides

Getting hands-on with cloud.gov:

• [x] Sign up for a cloud.gov sandbox using your GSA email address and start experimenting to get familiar with the basics of the PaaS from a user's perspective.
  • This is also required in order to make you a platform admin once you've completed the Cybersecurity and Privacy training.

Team resources:

You will automatically be added to one or more Google Drives: the Cloud.gov All Staff Drive and, for federal employees, the Cloud.gov Federal Employees Drive. Put all documents related to cloud.gov in the appropriate shared drive so the team can access them and meet federal records requirements. Each drive contains a folder for each squad, and each squad folder contains a "wiki" that explains how the sub-folders are structured.

Federal employees and staff contractors, expand this section:

- [x] Subscribe to [the cloud.gov team calendar](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=gsa.gov_0samf7guodi7o2jhdp0ec99aks@group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles) (click the + in the bottom right) so you know when assorted team meetings are happening in the various squads. Tip: When you plan Out of Office time, make a calendar event for that on the cloud.gov calendar so that your teammates know you'll be away

Slack channels

The following cloud.gov channels are public and all team members are welcome to join:

• [ ] #cg-aws-status - bots post announcements about AWS service outages/incidents
• [ ] #cg-business - business development (if applicable)
• [ ] #cg-compliance - compliance-related information and discussion
• [ ] #cg-customer-success - customer success squad channel
• [ ] #cg-general - program-level information and discussion
• [ ] #cg-offtopic - off-topic team sharing
• [ ] #cg-platform-news (🗣️) - bots post platform alerts (mostly CI job notifications)
• [ ] #cg-platform - platform operations
• [x] #cg-support (🗣️) - support requests and assistance within TTS
• [ ] #cg-supportstream (🗣️) - stream of activity on Zendesk tickets
• [ ] #cloud-gov (🗣️) - bots post announcements here

Channels marked with (🗣️) receive a lot of messages, either from customers or bots, and you may want to mute them.

Project contractors: Your buddy will add you to the private channel for your project.

Federal employees and staff contractors, expand this section:

Your onboarding buddy will add you to these Slack channels: - [ ] `#cg-aws-security` - private channel where bots post security notices - [ ] `#cg-billing` - private business development channel (if applicable) - [ ] `#cg-incidents` - private channel for incident response - [ ] `#cg-ops-banter` - private channel for operations/engineering banter - [ ] `#cg-priv-all` - private channel for in-team discussion - [ ] `#cg-priv-compliance` - private channel for security and compliance discussions Lastly, for federal employees only: - [ ] `#cg-priv-gov` - may contain discussion of contracting-related or other private, federal-employee-only comms

Engineering-specific items

Machine admin rights

In order to install development tools on your Mac, you will need to request local admin rights by submitting a ServiceDesk ticket using this justification. If you're unable to create a ticket for yourself, your onboarding buddy can create one for you.

Cloud Operations account management

Before starting this section, you must complete:

1. GSA Mandatory Cyber Security and Privacy Training
2. Role-based trainings listed under "Learn our policies and procedures"

AWS user names should be identical across accounts so that permissions can be correctly managed by Terraform.

• [ ] Create AWS Accounts by following these instructions. These accounts should be setup as read-only at the start, and once the 3 mandatory cloud.gov trainings are complete they will be switched to full admin accounts and added to the audit input file:
  • [ ] AWS Commercial accounts
  • [ ] AWS GovCloud accounts
  • [ ] Ensure Eleni has 60-day Google Calendar reminder to reset passwords
• [ ] Add them to Nessus Manager via the GUI
• [ ] Make them an admin of the platform.
• [ ] Add them to the platform-ops team in GitHub.
• [ ] Add them as an admin on the cg-django-uaa docs
• [ ] Add them to our dockerhub org and ensure we're not over our license count
• [ ] Add them as an agent to the cloud.gov support Zendesk (Ask a cloud.gov member with admin access to Zendesk to add them).
• [ ] Add them as Technical users to Ubuntu Advantage (Admin users for leads and supervisors)

Your onboarding buddy will create a separate ticket tied to this one to track the AWS accounts being granted full admin access.

Google Groups and Spaces

We manage calendar invites and Google Drive access using Google Groups. Some groups can also receive message from outside emails.

• [ ] Project contractors: Add them to the [cloud.gov Project Contractors Google Group]() for access to the All Staff Google Drive.

Federal employees and staff contractors, expand this section:

Add them to the following Google Groups: - [ ] [cloud.gov Team](https://groups.google.com/a/gsa.gov/forum/?hl=en#!forum/cloud-gov) so they can participate in team-wide internal communication. - [ ] Business Unit Only - Add them to the [cloud.gov inquiries Google Group](https://groups.google.com/a/gsa.gov/forum/#!forum/cloud-gov-inquiries) so they can keep apprised of prospective new clients. And the following Google Space: - [ ] [CG-PRIV](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#chat/space/AAAAr60JXAc), a fallback team communication channel in the event Slack is down. Lastly, for federal employees only: - [ ] [cloud.gov Federal Employees](https://groups.google.com/a/gsa.gov/g/cloud-gov-federal-employees/members)

Additional compliance setup/review

• [x] Install caulking git leak prevention by following the README
• [x] Verify caulking by running make audit and pasting a screenshot as a comment on this GitHub issue
• [x] Set GPG signing set up for GitHub (instructions here) and paste the output of git config commit.gpgsign as a comment on this GitHub issue

Install a development environment for cloud.gov

Note: Make sure you have followed the instructions in Machine admin rights at the top of this section to get local admin rights on your machine before moving forward

• [x] Install Homebrew (brew)
• [x] Install CloudFoundry for mac per their docs:
  • brew tap cloudfoundry/tap
  • brew install cf-cli@8
  • brew install openssl
• [x] Verify CloudFoundry Installation via the CLI (once an existing cloud.gov teammate has made your cloud.gov admin account)
  • cf login -a api.fr.cloud.gov --sso
  • cf orgs
  • As a cloud.gov team member, you should have a very giant list of organizations
  • If you have none or one (e.g. sandbox) org, please reach out to your onboarding buddy
• [x] Install the Bosh CLI using their instructions for MacOS
  • brew install cloudfoundry/tap/bosh-cli
  • [x] Verify the installation by running bosh -v in the command line
• [x] Install Terraform and other tools per cg-provision
  • brew install terraform
  • brew install awscli
  • brew install jq
  • [x] Verify Terraform installed and is in your path: run terraform and helper text should display
  • [x] Verify AWS CLI installed and is in your path: run aws and helper text should display
• [ ] Install and configure aws-vault by following our directions
• [ ] Install the Concourse fly CLI. Concourse does not sign fly with an Apple Developer account, so you must use xattr to manually remove the binary from quarantine:
  • brew install fly && xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /opt/homebrew/bin/fly.
  • [ ] Verify by running fly -h in your command line
• [ ] Install cloud.gov dev tools by cloning the cg-scripts repo: run git clone https://github.com/cloud-gov/cg-scripts.git in your command line

Figure out your first tasks

Project contractors: Check in with your project lead about first tasks.

Federal employees and staff contractors, expand this for instructions.

Please work with your onboarding buddy and your squad to determine a platform component to work on first. Once you've identified the component you're going to focus on, your onboarding buddy will introduce you to someone who can onboard you to that project in specific. For the next few sprints, work on features, bugs, and improvements on this component. Reach out to your onboarding buddy or anyone else on the team if you need any help. Here are some easily-separated pieces to consider: - S3 broker (Golang, Open Service Broker API) - Aws broker (Golang, Open Service Broker API) - Domain brokers and friends (New stuff is all python + Open Service Broker API): - External-domain broker - legacy domain broker - cdn broker - Logging stack (BOSH, ELK) - Prometheus (BOSH) - Stratos (golang + js) - uaa-extras (python + OIDC) - shibboleth (Java, OIDC)

Compliance items

These are items that are only necessary for someone stepping into a compliance role, but you can still subscribe to the alerts and mailing lists if you're interested:

• [ ] Subscribe to CISA alerts/updates: https://www.cisa.gov/about/contact-us/subscribe-updates-cisa
• [ ] Subscribe to FedRAMP mailing lists: https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/USGSA/subscriber/topics?qsp=USGSA_2224
• [ ] Read Compliance Lead documents at root of the Google Drive Security and Compliance folder

[jduss4]

I skipped a number of sections that felt less relevant to the work I'll be immediately doing for the cloud.gov dashboard, such as the AWS setup and BOSH training. Otherwise, I think I have read or set up everything I need to start contributing soon! Let me know if there's more I should do, @hursey013 , or if this issue can be closed!