This is interesting. What I’m hearing is they didn’t have proper anti-affinity rules I’m place, or backups for mission-critical equipment.
The data center did some dumb stuff, but that shouldn’t matter if you set up your application failover properly. Architecture and not testing failovers are the real issue here
Also sounded like they had apps centered/only there that had to be online for everything else to work.
But the 4-minutes-instead-of-10 batteries certainly didn’t help.
That’s exactly it.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-on-cloudflare-control-plane-and-analytics-outage/Here is a quick summary, but the actual postmortem is worth reading.
Classic example of cascade failure or domino effect. Luckily their resilience wasn’t a full outageBasically, new features get developed fast and are iterated quickly. When they mature, they get integrated into the high availability cluster.
There are also some services that are deliberately not clustered. One of which is logging, which should cause logs to pile up “at the edge” when the logging core service is down.
Unfortunately, some services were too tightly coupled to the logging core. So they should’ve been HA clustered, but were unable to cope with the core logging service being down.
Whilst HA failover had been tested, the core services has never been taken offline, so all this was missed.Which all ended up with inconsistent high-availability amongst different services and products. A lot of new features would have failed as expected, and some mature features that shouldn’t have failed did.
When they brought their disaster recovery site up, there were some things that needed manual configuration, and some newer features that hadn’t been tested in a disaster recovery scenario.
They are now focusing significant resources on:
- Remove dependencies on our core data centers for control plane configuration of all services and move them wherever possible to be powered first by our distributed network.
- Ensure that the control plane running on the network continues to function even if all our core data centers are offline.
- Require that all products and features that are designated Generally Available must rely on the high availability cluster (if they rely on any of our core data centers), without having any software dependencies on specific facilities.
- Require all products and features that are designated Generally Available have a reliable disaster recovery plan that is tested.
- Test the blast radius of system failures and minimize the number of services that are impacted by a failure.
- Implement more rigorous chaos testing of all data center functions including the full removal of each of our core data center facilities.
- Thorough auditing of all core data centers and a plan to reaudit to ensure they comply with our standards.
- Logging and analytics disaster recovery plan that ensures no logs are dropped even in the case of a failure of all our core facilities.
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Surprised a company of their scale and with such a reliance on stability isn’t running their own data centres. I guess they were trusting their failover process enough not to care
They probably need to be in so many different locations, and so many different network nodes, that they don’t want to consolidate like that. Their whole point of being is to be everywhere, on every backbone node, to have minimum latency to as many users as possible.
This reminds me of how AWS lost critical infra when us-east-1 went down. That’s including the status dashboard that was only hosted there.
I’ll be curious to learn if the battery issue was due to being under-dimensioned, or just aged and at reduced capacity.
Or not properly maintained and at reduced capacity.
the overnight shift consisted of security and an unaccompanied technician who had only been on the job for a week.
That poor bastard.
It isn’t Flexentials year.
They got burned by DediPath.
They got burned by NextArray.
They just got ousted by Cloudflare.
If it keeps up it’s going to someone is going to be making 3 envelopes….
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Cloudflare’s main network and security duties continued as normal throughout the outage, even if customers couldn’t make changes to their services at times, Prince said.
We’re told by Prince that “counter to best practices, Flexential did not inform Cloudflare that they had failed over to generator power,” and so didn’t have a heads up that maybe things were potentially about to go south and that contingencies should be in place.
Whatever the reason, a little less than three hours later at 1140 UTC (0340 local time), a PGE step-down transformer at the datacenter – thought to be connected to the second 12.47kV utility line – experienced a ground fault.
By that, he means at 1144 UTC - four minutes after the transformer ground fault – Cloudflare’s network routers in PDX-04, which connected the cloud giant’s servers to the rest of the world, lost power and dropped offline, like everything else in the building.
At this point, you’d hope the servers in the other two datacenters in the Oregon trio would automatically pick up the slack, and keep critical services running in the absence of PDX-04, and that was what Cloudflare said it had designed its infrastructure to do.
The control plane services were able to return online, allowing customers to intermittently make changes, and were fully restored about four hours later from the failover, according to the cloud outfit.
The original article contains 1,302 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It was poor design. Poor design caused a 2 day outage. When you’ve got an H/A control plane designed, deployed in production, running services, and you ARE NOT actively using it for new services let alone porting old services to it, you’ve got piss poor management with no understanding of risk.
What does she do on the notebook?
I think she is reading the matrix code
Mr magoo it’s the CEO
