Cases3 cases

1 to 3 of 3

1. IL-0170 During a Lunar New Year event, traffic more than three times normal filled the nf_conntrack table on the EKS node running the Istio ingress gateway, dropping packets and taking down Backpackr's web and app services

   Backpackr2025

   Symptoms

   During a Lunar New Year event in January 2024, a developer posted a message in Slack suspecting an outage. While several people were checking it, the problem grew into a full outage of Backpackr's web and app services, and the company decided to stop the event.

   Service outage

   Trigger

   An unexpected traffic surge, more than three times normal, during the Lunar New Year event in January 2024.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   conntrack tableIngress controllerIstio

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failureUnreviewed defaultsMonitoring blind spot

   Detection

   A developer reported a suspected outage in Slack; the outage became total while several people were still confirming it.

   Remediation

   • stopped the Lunar New Year event

   Action items

   • Raise net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max on all nodes to memory bytes/16384/2, and three times that on Istio nodes, applied by the nodeOptimizer DaemonSet
   • Configure Istio mesh networking so sidecars communicate directly instead of through the ingressGateway
   • Upgrade the Istio nodes from c6.xlarge (12.5 Gbps) to n-type instances with up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth
   • Strengthen monitoring with ENA network bandwidth and packet drops, detailed Istio ingressGateway and sidecar metrics, and CPU, memory and saturation

   Lessons

   When every request in a cluster goes through one ingress gateway node, that node's connection tracking table and network bandwidth set the limit for the whole service. The default nf_conntrack table size was too small for three times normal traffic, and once it filled, packets were dropped. After the outage Backpackr strengthened its monitoring of network bandwidth, packet drops and the Istio components.

   View case
2. IL-0093 Ingress controller pods crash-looped one after another because the leader pod had exhausted its shared memory

   UK Ministry of Justice2020

   Symptoms

   At 10:43 on 14 August 2020 two of the six ingress controller pods in the cluster were in a crash loop. Restarting those pods did not fix them.

   Container crash loop

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   Ingress controller

   Contributing factor

   Harmful manual actionSingle point of failure

   Detection

   Two of the six ingress controller pods were seen crash-looping at 10:43; the incident was declared at 11:01.

   Remediation

   • restarted the leader ingress controller pod so the other replicas could connect and get the latest nginx configuration

   View case
3. IL-0031 Kubernetes API server OOM-killed, leaving the Skipper ingress without routes; the talk points to a misconfigured CronJob manifest

   Zalando2018

   Symptoms

   Customers were affected, and Zalando's IAM service answered requests with HTTP 404. The talk shows this on slides titled "Customer impact" and "IAM returning 404", followed by a slide on the number of pods in the cluster.

   High error rateControl plane unresponsiveOOMKilled

   Trigger

   A CronJob (apiVersion batch/v2alpha1, schedule "*/15 9-19 * * Mon-Fri") whose concurrencyPolicy: Forbid and job history limits sat inside the pod template spec instead of the CronJob spec. The talk shows it right after the slides on the number of pods and the API server being OOM-killed, and the lessons add a quota on the number of pods.

   Root cause

   Capacity exhaustion

   Component

   Kubernetes API serverIngress controller

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failureExcessive blast radius

   Remediation

   • fixed the CronJob manifest: moved concurrencyPolicy: Forbid and the job history limits to the CronJob spec, added activeDeadlineSeconds: 120 and changed the schedule to "7 8-18 * * Mon-Fri"

   Action items

   • Make the ingress stay healthy during API server problems
   • Make the ingress keep the last known set of routes
   • Use a ResourceQuota on the number of pods (the example sets pods: "1500")

   Lessons

   An AWS ALB routes traffic to all hosts when all hosts report unhealthy, so the ingress should stay healthy during API server problems. An ingress controller that reads routes from the API server should keep its last known set of routes. Use a quota for the number of pods.

   View case

By root cause1