text stringlengths 0 2.02k |
|---|
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's an example of a runbook then? Let's say for our case, the Fastly outage, which is a once-in-five -- they're not gonna do that in the next five years. I'm knocking on wood over here... It would be smart of them-- |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Remember my certainty? 100% uptime? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Next week Fastly goes down. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. Don't jinx it. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, given their responsibility and size, they're probably gonna be less likely to do that again anytime soon is kind of what I mean by that. But even that -- would you codify in a runbook a Fastly outage? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think I would-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Now you might, because you have this hindsight of recent events... But prior to this you probably wouldn't. So what's a more common runbook for a team like us? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think I would codify the incidents that happened. For example, if we had an incident management platform, when the Fastly incident happened, I would have used whatever the platform or whatever this tool offered me to manage that incident. And as an outcome of managing the incident, we would have had... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I see. So it's retrospectively. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** An incident happens, it doesn't happen again. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Well, it may... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, "This is what I've done to fix it." And anyone can follow those steps. And maybe if something for example happens a couple of times, then we create a runbook. But at least Jerod can see "Oh, this happened six months ago. This is what Gerhard did. Maybe I should do the same." I don't know. For ex... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess then the question is when the incident happens again, how does somebody know where to go look for these runbooks? I suppose if you're using one of these services it gets pretty easy, because it's like "Hey, go to this service", and there's a runbooks dashboard, so to speak. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. I think it's just specific to the service. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:04\] Yeah. And you go there and you're like "Oh man, there's never been a runbook for this. I'm screwed. Call Gerhard" or "Call so-and-so", you know? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I suppose... But I think if you operate a platform long enough or a system long enough, you see many, many things, and it just progresses to the point that -- let's imagine that we did have multi-cloud. Let's imagine that Linode was completely down, and the app was running elsewhere. We wouldn't... |
In this case, for example, we didn't have this, but right now if the backend goes away, if everything disappears, we can recreate everything within half an hour. Now, how would you do that? It's simple for me, but if I had to do it maybe once and codify it, which is actually what I have in mind for the 2022 setup, I wi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, because 2021 is kind of a STDIN your codifying the current golden standard. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The steps that I would take, yes, to set up a new one. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, exactly, to get to zero, where you're at right now; this is ground zero. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. In 2021, what I set up was fairly easy to stand up, because I changed these things inside the setup, so that for example right now the first step which it does - it downloads from backup everything it doesn't have. So if you're standing this up on a fresh setup, it obviously has no assets, no da... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which is smart, because the point of backup is restoration, not storage... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Exactly, exactly. We test it at least once a year now. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, what's important to mention here is that this may not be what every team should do. In many cases, this is exploration on our part. This is not so much what every team out there should do in terms of redundancy. We're doing it in pursuit of 1) knowledge, and 2) content to share. So we may ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Definitely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In some cases it's probably not wise, because you have product to focus on, or other things. Maybe you have a dedicated team of SRE's, and in that case, their sole job is literally uptime, and that totally make sense... But for us, we're a small team, so maybe our seemingly unwavering focus on uptim... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And it makes us think about things in a different way. So if you try something out, why are you trying something out? Well, we have a certain problem to address, and it may be a fun one, but we will learn. So it's this curiosity, this building curiosity. How does Incident.io work? How does FireHydrant... |
Some are hard, some are dead simple, and sometimes you may even be surprised and say "You know what - I would not have guessed that this platform is so much better, so why are we complicating things using this other thing?" But you don't know until you try it. And you can't be trying these things all the time, so you n... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[40:05\] This reminds me of Sesame Street. Have either of you watched Sesame Street? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Not that I remember... |
**Jerod Santo:** No. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course. Everybody knows Sesame Street. But my son is a year and a half old, so he watches Sesame Street... But something that Hailee Steinfeld sings on the show is "I wonder... What if... Let's try..." That's kind of what we're doing here, "I wonder how this would work out if we did this. What if... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's how all great ideas start. The majority of the ideas may fail, but how are you going to find the truly remarkable ideas that work well in practice? Because on paper everything is amazing, everything is new, everything is shiny. How well does it work in practice? And that's where we come... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's all about gleaning, really. We're doing some of this stuff, and the entire solution, the way we do it may not be pertinent to the listener in every single case, but it's about gleaning what makes sense for your case. The classic "It depends" comes into play. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This makes sense to do, in some cases. Does it work for me? It depends. Maybe. Maybe not. |
Break: \[41:31\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I would like us to talk about the specifics, three areas of improvements for the changelog.com setup. Not for the whole year 2022, but just like over the next couple of months. Top of my list is the incident management, so have some sort of incident management... But that seems like a on-the-side s... |
The next thing is I would like to integrate Fastly logging. This is the origin, the backend logging with Grafana Cloud. The reason why I think we need to have that is to understand how our origin, in this case Linode (LKE) where changelog.com runs - how does the origin behave from a Fastly perspective, from a CDN persp... |
So what I mean by that is like when a request hits Fastly, that request has to be proxied to a node balancer running in Linode, and that has to be proxied to Ingress NGINX running in Kubernetes, and that has to be proxied to eventually our instance of Changelog. How does that work? How does that interaction work? How m... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[44:00\] How hard is that to set up? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Not too hard. The only problematic area is that Fastly doesn't support sending logs directly to Grafana Cloud. So I looked into this a couple of months ago, and the problem is around authenticating the HTTPS origin where the logs will be sent... Because it needs to push logs, HTTP requests. So how do ... |
So we need to set up - and again, this is in the support you get with Fastly, what they recommend is you need to set up a proxy... Imagine you have NGINX, it receives those requests which are the Fastly logs (it will be HTTPS), and then it proxies them to Grafana Cloud. So that would work. |
**Jerod Santo:** Where would we put our proxy? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Well, we would use the Ingress NGINX on Kubernetes, the one that serves all the traffic, all the Changelog traffic. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, couldn't we DDOS ourselves then? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** We could, if Fastly sends a large amount of logs... Yes, we could. Now, would we set another-- |
**Jerod Santo:** This is not a DDOS if it's ourselves. It's just a regular DOS. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.