Cases6 cases

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1. IL-0219 GoCardless's API and Dashboard failed every request for 1 hour 50 minutes when Pacemaker did not promote a replica

   GoCardless2017

   Symptoms

   At 15:09 BST on 10 October 2017, GoCardless's monitoring detected a total outage of its API and Dashboard: every request failed and returned an error. By 15:11 engineers saw evidence of a disk array failure on the primary Postgres node, but the Pacemaker cluster had not failed over to the synchronous replica as it should have.

   Service outageFailover failure

   Trigger

   The RAID controller of the primary Postgres node lost 3 disks of its array at once, so all reads and writes on the primary failed.

   Root cause

   Hardware failure

   Component

   DatabaseDatabase failover manager

   Contributing factor

   Overlapping failuresUnverified assumption

   Detection

   GoCardless's monitoring detected the total outage of the API and Dashboard at 15:09 BST, and engineers began investigating.

   Remediation

   • Powered off the broken primary Postgres node
   • Cleared the Pacemaker error counts with crm resource cleanup, which had no effect
   • Edited recovery.conf on the synchronous replica under maintenance mode several times, which Pacemaker reverted
   • Put the cluster into maintenance mode, configured the synchronous replica as primary and started Postgres by hand
   • Reconfigured the backend applications to connect to the new primary's actual IP address
   • Bootstrapped a third node as an asynchronous replica
   • Added a VIP managed by hand by the infrastructure team for manual failover
   • Verified data integrity and found no corruption
   • Migrated to a new Pacemaker-managed database cluster in a maintenance window and decommissioned the old one

   Action items

   • Express the Backup VIP rule as an INF preference for a replica instead of a -INF preference against the primary
   • Replace the VIPs with proxies on the application servers that route traffic by the state of the cluster
   • Run harsher fault injection tests of the Postgres cluster and consider automation that injects failures continually
   • Consider adding arbitrary restrictions to game day exercises, such as automation that has failed and a problem that cannot be diagnosed, so engineers practise bringing the service back another way

   Lessons

   A rule that two resources must not run together does not behave like the opposite of a rule that they must run together, and in some failure conditions the difference stopped Pacemaker from promoting a replica. A misconfiguration that shows only when two processes crash at almost the same time will not appear in basic tests or daily operations, only through fault injection. After two years in which the automation had handled every failure, the team's skill at controlling the cluster by hand had faded, and a runbook unused for years would likely have been out of date.

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2. IL-0431 During Mackerel's move to AWS, PostgreSQL failed over to a replica that had stopped replicating, losing an hour of data

   Hatena2017

   Symptoms

   On 7 August 2017, while checking the application after the maintenance that moved Mackerel from an on-premises data center to AWS, the team found that data updated during a specific time window was missing. Everything written to the PostgreSQL database between 14:30 and 15:30 JST was gone.

   Data lossReplication lagNetwork unreachable

   Trigger

   One hour after the application was switched to the newly promoted primary db001, db001 lost network connectivity and the database failed over to the standby db002.

   Root cause

   Operator error

   Component

   DatabaseDatabase replicationDatabase failover manager

   Contributing factor

   Overlapping failuresUnreviewed defaultsUnrepresentative stagingAutomation amplification

   Detection

   The team found the missing data while checking how the application behaved after the migration work.

   Remediation

   • Tried to restore the lost updates by hand from the table data left on db001 and gave up
   • Tried point-in-time recovery from the base backup and WAL and gave up
   • Built a new replica db003 with db002 as primary to restore redundancy
   • Kept db001 in maintenance state for investigation
   • Watched db002 for some time to confirm the problem did not recur, then completed the migration

   Action items

   • Change the PostgreSQL replica creation script to set recovery_target_timeline = 'latest' in recovery.conf by default
   • Add a check to a server configuration test tool such as Serverspec that recovery.conf contains recovery_target_timeline = 'latest'

   Lessons

   A setting needed only for a rare layout, such as a grandchild replica during a migration, was applied by hand through a script option and was forgotten. Because recovery_target_timeline = 'latest' is harmless on ordinary standbys too, Hatena now sets it by default whenever a replica is created. The staging rehearsal used the same layout and steps but had the setting right, so it could not catch the mistake. Hatena notes that a similar layout may be used again for a future PostgreSQL upgrade or a move to another region.

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3. IL-0278 A weekly update put a Redis Cloud management process into an infinite loop, and most nodes of a GCP cluster failed

   Redis2016

   Symptoms

   On 8 February 2016 at 17:45 UTC, four nodes of the Redis Cloud cluster us-central1-1-1.gce.garantiadata.com on Google Cloud Platform stopped responding, four minutes after a first node had failed. The databases whose endpoints end in us-central1-1-1.gce.garantiadata.com went down.

   Service outageFailover failure

   Trigger

   The weekly upgrade of Redis Cloud's non-critical cluster components reached its first Google Cloud Platform cluster, us-central1-1-1.gce.garantiadata.com, at 17:30 UTC.

   Root cause

   Faulty deployment

   Component

   In-memory cacheDatabase failover managerAuthoritative DNS servers and records

   Contributing factor

   Overlapping failures

   Remediation

   • Shut down and terminated all nodes of the cluster
   • Deleted all of the cluster's endpoints from its DNS zone, removing by hand the entries left by throttled deletes
   • Provisioned new cluster nodes from scratch without the weekly update
   • Reconnected the original nodes' storage to the new nodes so persistence-enabled databases could be recovered
   • Bootstrapped and launched the databases, recovering the ones with persistence from storage

   Action items

   • Suspend all automatic weekly upgrades until a procedure that prevents this kind of outage is in place
   • Revalidate the QA processes for DevOps code deployments
   • Improve the tooling so it handles throttling of DNS requests

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4. IL-0303 GitHub's MySQL master failed over to a node with a cold buffer pool during a schema migration and GitHub.com went down

   GitHub2012

   Symptoms

   On Monday, September 10th, 2012, during a schema migration, the health checks on GitHub's MySQL master failed and Percona Replication Manager moved the 'active' role to another node of the new three-node cluster. That node's InnoDB buffer pool was cold and it performed poorly, its health checks failed in turn, and the role failed back to the original server. GitHub.com went down.

   Failover failureDatabase overloadHigh latencyReplication lagSplit brainService outage

   Trigger

   A schema migration on Monday, September 10th put more load on the master database than earlier migrations had, and Percona Replication Manager's health checks on the master failed.

   Root cause

   Software defect

   Component

   DatabaseDatabase failover managerDatabase replication

   Contributing factor

   Automation amplificationDependence on a warm cacheHarmful manual actionOverlapping failures

   Detection

   On the morning of September 11th, a developer told the operations team that the 'standby' node was returning incorrect query results.

   Remediation

   • Enabled Pacemaker's maintenance-mode so no health checks or automatic failovers ran, and let the buffer pool warm
   • Powered off the out-of-date node 'c' to end the partition
   • Stopped Pacemaker and Heartbeat on nodes 'a' and 'b' and started them on node 'a' only
   • Started MySQL on node 'a' in the active role
   • Removed the events leaked to wrong dashboards and audited the wrongly routed repositories
   • Contacted the owners of the exposed private repositories

   Action items

   • Change the Pacemaker configuration so the active database role fails over only when an operations engineer starts it
   • Find a way to warm the InnoDB buffer pool of slave databases so failovers do not hurt performance
   • Audit the Pacemaker and Heartbeat stack, focusing on the code path behind the segfault
   • Run hardware tests on the server where the segfault happened

   Lessons

   GitHub concluded that automated failover is not the right strategy for its primary production database: for every failover in this incident, any member of the operations team would have said it should not happen. Failovers that must happen, in an emergency or during maintenance, should not hurt performance.

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