Cases9 cases

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1. IL-0591 Gitpod workspaces in all regions became IO bound and unresponsive for days after the ws39 workspace cluster release

   Gitpod2022

   Symptoms

   From April 11, 2022 at 13:17 UTC customers and Gitpod staff reported that Gitpod workspaces were intermittently becoming unresponsive. CPU usage of nodes and pods looked normal, with nothing maxed out, and at 13:58 UTC the team found that the workspaces were IO bound rather than CPU bound.

   Throughput degradationSustained high node CPUNode NotReadyData loss

   Trigger

   The ws39 generation of workspace clusters, released to all regional clusters on April 8th at 20:08 UTC and to the XL clusters on April 9th at 17:45 UTC, split the 1TB disk into smaller RAID0 disks, changed CPU limiting and workspace networking, and moved to faster machine types.

   Root cause

   Faulty deployment

   Component

   Node root diskContainer CPU limit

   Contributing factor

   No staged rolloutGap in automated testsUnrepresentative stagingUnknown limitOverlapping failuresIneffective rollbackHarmful manual actionLimited debug access

   Detection

   Customers and Gitpod staff reported on April 11th at 13:17 UTC that workspaces were intermittently unresponsive, and the team opened an incident in Slack through its incident.io integration. On April 17th the team noticed increased CPU load on the workspace nodes and opened an internal incident.

   Remediation

   • Shifted workspace starts back to the ws38 clusters on April 11th
   • Built ws39a clusters with c2d machines and local SSDs and moved traffic to them
   • Requested a limit increase from Let's Encrypt
   • Routed EU XL traffic to the regional EU cluster and built ws-eu39bxl to replace the crashed ws-eu39xl
   • Cleaned up workspaces stuck in a stopping state so users could start them again
   • Released ws40 with 1TB boot disks to get more IO bandwidth
   • Removed the workspaces that consumed excessive CPU time for crypto-mining
   • Blocked the fraudulent users behind the crypto-mining from using Gitpod
   • Rolled back the ws-daemon change that broke CPU limiting and shipped the fix in the ws34 clusters
   • Blocked ACME HTTP requests to workspace ports so Let's Encrypt rate limits would not be hit again
   • Rolled out IO limiting with the ws41xl and ws41 clusters and moved traffic to them step by step

   Action items

   • Invest in test automation so that test results stop releases like this one
   • Vary the interval between traffic shifts to new clusters, with more time for larger releases
   • Add a risk assessment stage, to be automated, that governs changeset size and rollout speed of workspace cluster rollouts
   • Reduce the impact teams have on each other
   • Add review criteria that find backwards incompatible changes before pull requests are merged, and split such pull requests
   • Recommend rollback as the primary means of mitigation in the incident procedures, and look at automating it
   • Make the status page show the workspace service as down when it is, and update the playbooks
   • Keep incident communication in a single Slack channel and Google Meet
   • Put 10% of the engineering staff on the on-call rotation from May 9th and use that time on observability, alerting and stability

   Lessons

   Gitpod concluded that it should have committed to rolling back on April 11th instead of building and shipping fixes, which kept customers on degraded workspaces longer than necessary. A large release so soon after the previous one needed a risk assessment and slower traffic shifts, and backwards incompatible changes that block a rollback need to be found before pull requests are merged. Failure-free operations require experience with failure.

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2. IL-0449 Pods on Enigmo's new EKS managed node groups kept restarting or stuck Terminating and the nodes became unusable

   Enigmo2020

   Symptoms

   Two or three days after Enigmo created EKS managed node groups and moved its pods there from the old node groups, the cluster suddenly became unstable: pods restarted again and again or could not stop and stayed around indefinitely, node CPU and memory load rose high, and the nodes became unusable from the cluster.

   Pods stuck in TerminatingSustained high node CPUMemory pressureNode NotReadyUpgrade stall

   Trigger

   Enigmo created EKS managed node groups that used an AMI containing the bug and moved its pods onto them, as preparation for upgrading EKS from 1.15 to 1.16.

   Root cause

   Breaking change in an upgrade

   Component

   Node operating system imageNode pool

   Contributing factor

   Ineffective rollbackChange with a delayed effect

   Remediation

   • Changed the managed node groups' AMI version to the fixed release
   • Ran the managed node group update through CloudFormation
   • Watched the pods across all namespaces during the update
   • Force-deleted every pod that stayed in Terminating with kubectl delete --grace-period=0 --force

   Action items

   • Check the latest releases of the cluster's modules quarterly or monthly and upgrade them regularly

   Lessons

   As long as a team uses Amazon EKS or Kubernetes, it has to keep track of upgrades of the cluster and of modules such as ingress controllers, because a release with breaking changes can be announced without warning after a long stable period. Checking releases and upgrading on a regular schedule keeps the effect of each upgrade on the service small.

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3. IL-0003 linkerd lost Kubernetes service discovery after an etcd reconfiguration, and restarting every linkerd instance turned failed payments into a full platform outage

   Monzo2017

   Symptoms

   At 14:10 an engineer deployed a change to a service that Monzo's current account needs to process payments, and every request to that service started to fail. Current account customers saw payment failures; the prepaid card was not affected at first because it does not use that service. The change was rolled back at 14:12, but the errors continued.

   High error rateStale endpoint routingService outage

   Trigger

   At 14:10 an engineer deployed a change to a service needed to process current account payments. Two weeks earlier the etcd cluster had been upgraded and grown from three to nine nodes, and one day earlier another team had scaled a new service down to zero replicas while leaving its Kubernetes service in place.

   Root cause

   Software defect

   Component

   etcdKubernetes API serverLinkerdkubelet

   Contributing factor

   Ineffective rollbackHarmful manual actionOverlapping failuresMonitoring blind spotSingle point of failure

   Detection

   Payment failures began right after the 14:10 deploy. The team rolled back at 14:12 and declared an outage internally at 14:16. At 15:13, when no service could serve requests, practically all automated alerts fired.

   Remediation

   • Rolled back the payments service change (the errors continued)
   • Activated internal backup processes so most customers could still use their card
   • Restarted all linkerd instances (this made the outage worse)
   • Restarted the three Kubernetes API server processes so replacement linkerd instances could start
   • Began deploying a newer linkerd version with the fix for empty services
   • Deleted the Kubernetes service that had no endpoints, which let linkerd load service discovery again

   Action items

   • Fix the bug in Kubernetes that can trigger timeouts after a cluster reconfiguration
   • Roll out a new version of linkerd that fixes the parsing error
   • Create better health checks, dashboards and alerts for the affected components so they give clearer signals about what is wrong and prevent human error
   • Improve procedures to communicate outages internally and externally as clearly and quickly as possible

   Lessons

   A large failure in a distributed system can be very hard to understand, and well-meant human action can compound it, as restarting every linkerd instance did here by exposing a second incompatibility. Because Monzo deploys often and its network changes constantly, the deployment and request-routing systems have to be trustworthy. Monzo committed to publishing a similar post-mortem for any incident of this severity.

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