March 2022 Summaries

Baseten achieves SOC 2 Type 1 certification Update: Baseten has now achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. In March, Baseten completed a rigorous audit by Sensiba San Filippo LLP, a leading CPA firm, to achieve System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type I certification. This effort, led by our CEO, involved providing auditors with detailed statements and substantial evidence about our product and operations. Developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), SOC 2 Type 1 is a single report that assesses the security posture of an organization at a point in time. To receive this certification, Baseten provided evidence of following best practices across five trust services criteria: Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy. The audit found Baseten's controls to be "suitably designed" for over 70 specific sub-criteria, demonstrating the company's careful custody of customers' information and robust infrastructure. This achievement demonstrates Baseten's commitment to providing a reliable and trustworthy platform for critical ML-powered business processes.

The author joined Baseten in January 2022 as a technical writer, impressed by the company's high-quality writing despite being heads-down on product development. The team needed to create best-in-class documentation that grew and evolved alongside the product, involving engineers in the creation process. They evaluated various solutions, including GitBook, Read the Docs, and self-hosting with Docusaurus or MkDocs, before settling on a "docs as code" approach using GitBook's GitHub sync, which allowed for version-controlled publishing, pull requests, build previews, and automated testing. The setup was quick and painless, but required additional work to address serving images and assets, including moving them to AWS S3 and Loom for screencasts. The author implemented a documentation style guide, meta-documentation on contributing docs, and incorporated documentation tasks into their work tracking system, enabling the team to create high-quality documentation that satisfied all stakeholders.