Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0295 Pusher's Channels publish API on the mt1 cluster was largely unavailable for 11 minutes while a Redis master failed over

   Pusher2022

   Symptoms

   At 10:42 UTC on 11 April 2022, the API for publishing messages to Pusher Channels on the mt1 cluster became largely unavailable, and from about 10:44 requests to the MT1 API returned more errors.

   Service outageHigh latencySplit brain

   Trigger

   An engineer restarted the master node of an mt1 Redis group to apply a larger replication buffer, after restarting both replicas of that group.

   Root cause

   Software defect

   Component

   In-memory cacheDatabase failover manager

   Contributing factor

   Unverified assumptionUnrepresentative staging

   Detection

   Pusher saw error rates rise for requests to the MT1 API from about 10:44 UTC.

   Action items

   • Fix the Redis shutdown script to check that failover has completed and the node is no longer a master before terminating

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2. 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   • Powered off the out-of-date node 'c' to end the partition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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