Kevin Fang
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2024
10:20 · 3.6M views · Apr 26, 2023
Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.
Shared as a funny, accurate retelling of a classic outage, especially on a bad ops day.
4 comments from Hacker News
Every time GL is mentioned, I am reminded of the 2017 incident where a person 'rm -rf' the primary pg data logs. The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day. this video It’s a shame they are selling out, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. GH is vacuuming up all of the market share. I kind of liked the ability to self host my own GL. But for small/personal use cases. It was a bit overkill.
"When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." Which sounds good in theory, until you run into issues like this: this video TLDW: Most of the Gitlabs outage where they deleted the primary prod and backup prod database could have been solved if they just waited for the command line op to complete - but because of a lack of feedback they thought it had frozen, leading to several other plans which made the situation worse.
Here is a retelling of the time when gitlab went down because someone deleted a production database: "Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues" this video
If the primary fails, will the replica fail over? How do you know? Are the backups working? Who's checking? Can anyone delete a directory when tired at 6PM on a Friday? this video