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1. IL-0517 Gitpod workspaces failed to start worldwide and lost data when CoreDNS lookups to 8.8.8.8 timed out in its clusters

   Gitpod2022

   Symptoms

   At around 5.44pm UTC on 25 January 2022, Gitpod saw a high error rate when pulling images from Google Container Registry (gcr.io), with the error "cannot get manifest". About 10 minutes later users reported that they could not start workspaces.

   Image pull failuresDNS resolution failuresService outageData loss

   Root cause

   DNS or network fault

   Component

   CoreDNSContainer registry and its credentialsObject storage

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failure

   Detection

   The team noticed a high error rate on image pulls from GCR at around 5.44pm UTC; about 10 minutes later users reported that workspaces would not start, and the on-call team started incident response.

   Remediation

   • Created new workspace clusters in the EU and the US with a werft job
   • Redirected traffic to the new clusters

   Action items

   • Keep workspace data on cloud provider persistent volumes that survive node and cluster failures
   • Let users download their files from a workspace that cannot be started
   • Improve the workspace backup process
   • Use three DNS servers instead of one: a GCP-internal one, 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1
   • Do more DNS resiliency work, tracked in an epic
   • Improve support for multi-region clusters and later go multi-cloud

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