Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0153 DOKS worker nodes went NotReady at 06:00 UTC on three days because a systemd timer in the Debian image ran apt upgrade and killed it mid kernel upgrade, breaking node networking

   DigitalOcean2023

   Symptoms

   Customers of DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes (DOKS) saw worker nodes go NotReady between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC and stay unavailable, taking down the services on them, until the nodes were replaced or rebooted; some nodes needed several replacements or reboots. The first sporadic reports on October 8 said replacing the node fixed it. The same thing happened again around 06:00 UTC on October 9, more widely and across many regions, and again on October 10. Only clusters on versions 1.27.6-do.0 and 1.28.2-do.0 were affected.

   Node NotReadyService outage

   Trigger

   A systemd timer in the DigitalOcean Debian image started apt upgrade daily at 06:00 UTC, with a random delay of up to 60 minutes.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   Node operating system imageLinux kernelkubelet

   Contributing factor

   Unreviewed defaultsLimited debug accessChange with a delayed effect

   Detection

   Sporadic customer reports of failed worker nodes arrived at 07:43 UTC on October 8; internal incident response started at 07:10 UTC on October 9 after broader impact across regions.

   Remediation

   • Advised customers to replace or reboot affected worker nodes
   • Arranged SSH and console access to worker nodes while they were healthy, and live-debugged an affected node on October 10
   • Released a DaemonSet to all affected clusters that disables the apt upgrade systemd timer on every worker node
   • Released new node images without the auto-update process

   Action items

   • Disable the timer during node provisioning, then remove the DaemonSet from all clusters
   • Add a check to the internal conformance test suite for new cluster versions that the auto-upgrade process and other unwanted timers stay disabled
   • Support logging into worker nodes even when normal access paths are broken

   Lessons

   An operating system auto-update timer left enabled in a node image can change the kernel and systemd underneath Kubernetes, and a timeout that kills the upgrade half-way can leave a node without networking. Failures that start at the same time every day point to a scheduled job on the nodes, and systemd timers belong on that list next to cron jobs. When the failure takes out a node's network, an investigation that depends on logging into the node stalls; access paths that work while the node is broken shorten diagnosis.

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2. IL-0198 An automatic Ubuntu security update restarted systemd-networkd, which flushed the IP rules Cilium relied on and cut more than 60 percent of Datadog's Kubernetes nodes off the network across regions and cloud providers

   Datadog2023

   Symptoms

   Between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC on 8 March 2023, Kubernetes nodes in several Datadog regions lost network connectivity at the same time, on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. All services across multiple regions were affected, including the regions that host Datadog's CI/CD and automation tools. Datadog's regions are not connected to each other and changes are rolled out one region at a time, so a simultaneous failure on several cloud providers looked implausible at first.

   Node NotReadyService outageThroughput degradation

   Trigger

   On 7 March 2023 Ubuntu published a systemd patch for a CVE (249.11-0ubuntu3.7). Ubuntu's default unattended upgrades installed it on the nodes between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC on 8 March, and installing it restarted systemd-networkd.

   Root cause

   Breaking change in an upgrade

   Component

   systemd-networkdCiliumNode operating system image

   Contributing factor

   Unreviewed defaultsChange with a delayed effectNo staged rolloutAutomation amplification

   Remediation

   • restarted thousands of disconnected instances on Google Cloud and Azure through the cloud APIs, keeping their local disks
   • rebuilt the data lost with terminated AWS instances' local disks through replication, reprocessing and restores from backup

   Lessons

   A change in a base operating system component can stay dormant for months until something restarts that component. Here the trigger was a security patch, and the change reached every region at once because automatic OS updates ran outside the progressive, region-by-region process used for every other change. Cloud providers react differently to an instance that loses its network. Google Cloud and Azure left the instances running, so a restart recovered them with their disks; AWS replaced them quickly, which brought stateless services back fast but destroyed the local-disk data the stateful services needed.

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