Cases6 cases

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1. IL-0017 AWS VPC CNI stopped allocating pod IP addresses on six nodes of the live cluster, leaving new pods in ContainerCreating

   UK Ministry of Justice2023

   Symptoms

   At 08:15 a user posted in the #ask-cloud-platform channel that new deployments were not starting: their pods stayed in ContainerCreating.

   Pods stuck in ContainerCreatingIP address exhaustion

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   AWS VPC CNINode pool

   Contributing factor

   No configuration tests

   Detection

   A user reported new deployments stuck in ContainerCreating in the #ask-cloud-platform channel at 08:15; the incident was declared at 09:31.

   Remediation

   • Added new nodes and cordoned and drained the six affected nodes
   • Enabled prefix delegation in the VPC CNI on the live cluster after comparing its CNI settings with a 1.23 test cluster

   Action items

   • Add a test or check that confirms IP address allocation is working as expected (#4669)

   Lessons

   The write-up states no lessons beyond its review action, which is to add a check that IP address allocation works.

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2. IL-0060 Kubernetes 1.24 upgrade removed the master node label that Calico route reflectors selected on, dropping all pod routes and taking Reddit down for 314 minutes

   Reddit2023

   Symptoms

   About two minutes after an engineer started the Kubernetes 1.23 to 1.24 upgrade of the cluster running Reddit's legacy stack, just after 19:00 UTC, the site stopped. The CDN edge request graph, which is kept separate from the cluster, showed traffic by status collapsing. Users saw the error page, a homepage with no posts, or plain errors.

   Service outageHigh error rateDNS resolution failuresMonitoring outagePods stuck in ContainerCreatingControl plane lag

   Trigger

   An in-place upgrade of the legacy cluster from Kubernetes 1.23 to 1.24; in 1.24 the node-role.kubernetes.io/master label is removed even from running clusters.

   Root cause

   Breaking change in an upgrade

   Component

   CalicoKubernetes API serverAdmission webhooketcd

   Contributing factor

   Configuration not in codeUnrepresentative stagingUntested backupMonitoring blind spotSingle point of failure

   Detection

   The site broke about two minutes into the upgrade; an incident was opened immediately and responders were on the call within three minutes, working from CDN edge graphs because the cluster's own metrics were gone.

   Remediation

   • deleted the Open Policy Agent webhook configurations to stop API server timeouts
   • terminated all worker nodes of the cluster
   • restored the control plane from the pre-upgrade backup onto the first control plane node
   • switched off the cluster autoscaler until the control plane was stable
   • generated new TLS certificates so replacement control plane nodes could join etcd
   • brought traffic back in steps from 1% to 100%
   • restarted legacy services that had been stopped by hand

   Action items

   • Codify cluster configuration so every choice has a record, and document in detail what cannot be codified
   • Standardise components across clusters and replace bespoke configurations
   • Build tooling to manage the lifecycle of whole clusters so they can be recreated or replicated
   • Add pre-production clusters that can be tested with confidence
   • Improve the backup restore process and make cluster upgrades safe

   Lessons

   Configuration that exists only in a live cluster, edited by hand through a special tool, can be forgotten, as the route reflector setup was, and then break on an upgrade nobody connects it to. A Kubernetes upgrade cannot be reverted without a restore, so the restore procedure has to be kept current and practised. Consistent, codified clusters are what make upgrades testable; bespoke clusters keep producing outages.

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3. IL-0521 AKS pods could not mount volumes and new nodes got no CNI network interface after the cluster service principal expired

   Jenkins project2021

   Symptoms

   From 18:02 UTC on 2 June 2021, the Jenkins infrastructure AKS cluster logged errors about pods that were unable to mount volumes and about scaled-up nodes that were unable to obtain a network virtual interface from the CNI.

   Credentials unavailablePods stuck in ContainerCreating

   Trigger

   The Azure Service Principal credential of the AKS cluster expired at 17:53 UTC on 2 June 2021.

   Root cause

   Certificate or credential expiry

   Component

   Cluster cloud identityPersistent volumes and stateful setsCNI pluginNode pool

   Contributing factor

   Monitoring blind spot

   Detection

   The error behind the failures was found in the AKS UI console while the team investigated the root cause of the LTS 2.289.1 release problem.

   Remediation

   • Renewed the AKS cluster's Azure Service Principal credential, which made AKS restart all nodes automatically

   Action items

   • Add an automatic PagerDuty check that alerts a week before the service principal expires, as is done for certificates
   • Keep a team-level calendar for manual operations such as resetting a credential
   • Consider managed identities, which renew automatically, instead of the service principal

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4. IL-0402 mybinder.org launches dropped to zero for hours because a JupyterHub pod on a lost GKE node kept its hub database PVC

   Binder Project2018

   Symptoms

   On 13 March 2018 at 07:28 CET the mybinder.org team noticed that JupyterHub had not been spawning new users and that the launch success rate on the Grafana dashboard had been at zero for several hours. Many pods were in the states "Unknown" and "NodeLost", on at least the nodes `10.128.0.7` and `10.128.0.5`.

   Service outageNode NotReadyPods stuck in TerminatingPods stuck in ContainerCreating

   Root cause

   unknown

   Component

   Persistent volumes and stateful setsNode pool

   Contributing factor

   Pages not delivered

   Detection

   The team noticed only after several hours, when the launch success rate on the Grafana dashboard had been at zero for a long time. No Stackdriver alert email arrived in time, because those emails were marked as spam and reached the team hours later.

   Remediation

   • Cordoned the bad nodes
   • Deleted the hub pod in Unknown state and the hub pod stuck in ContainerCreating
   • Reset node gke-prod-a-ssd-pool-32-134a959a-n2sk from the GCP web interface to force the PVC to be released
   • Force-deleted every pod in Unknown or NodeLost state with kubectl delete --grace-period=0 --force

   Action items

   • Investigate why the outage started, through Stackdriver logs and Google Cloud incidents
   • Set up an alerting service that does not depend on Stackdriver
   • Document how to check whether a PVC has not been released
   • Document how to restart a node by hand when commands are not working
   • Document how to delete pods that are in Unknown state

   Lessons

   The error went unnoticed for a long time because Stackdriver alert emails were marked as spam and arrived hours late. Once the problem was found, each step was logged and the steps were made more forceful as needed, so the hub was down only briefly after detection.

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