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  1. IL-0207 A routine task run from an engineer's local environment switched to production and deleted GitLab.com's Consul release, so Patroni lost Consul and GitLab.com returned 5xx errors to all traffic
    GitLab2022
    Symptoms

    GitLab's monitoring and alerting fired at once. One of the alerts reported a Patroni failover, and users of GitLab.com received 5XX errors; the CDN counted about 13 million requests answered with 503 during the outage.

    Service outageHigh error rateResources deleted
    Trigger

    An engineer ran a routine task with GitLab's tools in a local development environment; during a local deploy or rollback operation the tool's context changed from local development to production, and the change was applied to production.

    Root cause
    Operator error
    Component
    Application database
    Contributing factor
    No safeguard on destructive change
    Detection

    GitLab's monitoring and alerting fired immediately; one of the alerts reported a Patroni failover.

    Remediation
    • re-applied the Consul release to the production Kubernetes cluster, with manual steps because the tooling did not support the redeploy directly
    Action items
    • Improve the Kubernetes deployment process to reduce the risk of running harmful deployment operations against production from local environments (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/16875)
    • Integrate Teleport with the Kubernetes clusters, which could give SREs a read-only role by default (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/16221)
    Lessons

    A tool that can switch its target from a local environment to production during a deploy or rollback turns routine local work into a production change. GitLab plans to improve its Kubernetes deployment process so that harmful deployment operations are less likely to be run against production from local environments, and to integrate Teleport with its clusters, which could give SREs a read-only role by default. Detection and diagnosis were fast because the alerts led straight from Patroni to its dependency, Consul. Bringing the deleted release back needed manual work, because the tooling did not make the redeploy straightforward, but it was still done relatively quickly.

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By root cause1

Operator error1 case

Component
Application database
Contributing factor
No safeguard on destructive change
Organisation
GitLab
  1. IL-0207 A routine task run from an engineer's local environment switched to production and deleted GitLab.com's Consul release, so Patroni lost Consul and GitLab.com returned 5xx errors to all traffic
    GitLab2022