text stringlengths 0 2.35k |
|---|
**Dee Kitchen:** I've got another infinite loop one... Are we allowed to name company names? I don't know, maybe it's internal and I shouldn't... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I don't know. |
**Dee Kitchen:** I worked for a certain company which has an orange logo that has a bit of a light shining behind it, and they man-in-the-middle the entire internet... Now, with that in mind, when I was working for said company, in their DDoS team... We didn't DDoS people; we were protecting against DDoSes. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, I've wondered... The DDoS team! |
**Dee Kitchen:** \[unintelligible 00:13:56.02\] that's the opposite of what we're doing. No, we were trying to protect, and they have a system... They've got all these 200 POPs (points of presence), and thousands and thousands of servers... And every single one of these is protecting some of the traffic; each machine c... |
\[14:15\] And yet, they need to be able to actually show the value back to the customer, and make these sort of decisions centrally. So you send all the logs somewhere, and they're all been sent to one data center. So what you end up with is like, if you're doing globally 10 million requests per second, you get 10 mill... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Nice...! |
**Dee Kitchen:** A certain customer, on a certain point in time - industry and type to be non-disclosed - wrote an infinite loop in their client, and it basically spikes 8 million requests per second on top of our normal load. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, wow. |
**Dee Kitchen:** And they basically broke our logging, the entire visibility. So they were effectively under attack, but now flying blind, because we couldn't see anything because they'd broken all the logging. That was not a good day. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah... That one doesn't sound fun? What happened? |
**Dee Kitchen:** We figured out which customer it was, but we couldn't figure out the rest. But we asked them what they've done, and they figured out that bit and stopped it. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, wow. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** They fessed up to it, they owned up to it? Somebody wrote an infinite loop? |
**Dee Kitchen:** Yes. \[laughs\] I think they realized... They must have seen what was happening on their side. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** So they didn't pull a well -- well, I will not name names, but they didn't blame it on on of the interns? |
**Dee Kitchen:** Oh, we've got a certain thing where actually an intern did that. I had that intern, and he's actually really good tie. He's become a full-time engineer in that team. He's really good. Learned a lesson that none of us will replicate. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Oh, yeah. I love interns. I just don't like to throw them under the bus when something goes wrong with my company... \[laughs\] |
**Dee Kitchen:** No, that one was interesting... Also, at said man-in-the-middle company, we had a system -- the system was brilliant, right? You could send an instruction to any machine in the world in under 10 seconds, and every machine received the same instruction. And that's great when you want to say there's a ne... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I feel like there are many lessons there... |
**Dee Kitchen:** There was a lot of lessons. |
**Mat Ryer:** What we're having for lunch... \[laughter\] |
**Dee Kitchen:** Lunch went cold... |
**Mat Ryer:** That's scary, ain't it? But hang on... So can you explain - someone that doesn't know what a greedy regex is... What do you mean by that? |
**Dee Kitchen:** Yeah, a greedy regex... I mean, if you do something like .\*, what you're saying is match any character, any number of times. So if you .\*.\*, you've now exploded this any character, any number of times, followed by any character, any number of times. And what you're doing is you're increasing the CPU... |
So wherever this rule was applied - and we had shipped it globally to every single website, every single bit of traffic - we fried every single machine instantly. So it was about four hours for us to recover from that. And the teams I saw, they did interesting things. We were connecting directly to machines, and lookin... |
**Mat Ryer:** Wow... And what was the impact of that? How many people were affected? |
**Dee Kitchen:** Everything was affected. We knocked out a lot. DNS, TLS, HTTP, everything. It was one of those nightmare scenarios. And you sit there as a company, you sit there and you sort of go, "What are these meteorites?" the dinosaurs went extinct by a meteorite. "As a company or product service offering, what's... |
\[18:15\] And everyone has them. The thing that you've got to realize is when you're there, you've got to sympathize with -- you can accidentally see another company go through this... They're having a bad day, and you've got to sympathize, because one of those meteorites is gonna hit you one day. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, we see the HugOps goes around often on social media, and things, of people sending their support in those difficult times... |
**Dee Kitchen:** Yeah, there's a good tradition of sending cakes to each other to sort of go "Thinking of you..." |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Dee Kitchen:** And try and not have your salespeople ambulance-chase. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** How well was your break-glass procedures documented? |
**Dee Kitchen:** It was pretty good. We were lucky that this happened during a London lunch hour when all of the SRE team - the original SRE team - were there. It's possible for a few people to break glass; they could do so in about five minutes once we actually understood what we actually had to do. It took about 20 m... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Regular expressions, huh... |
**Dee Kitchen:** That's still hard. They're hard for everyone. Easy to write, hard to understand what they're doing. |
**Mat Ryer:** Why are they called that? What is regular about them? |
**Dee Kitchen:** That's out of my domain. I don't know if anyone's got the answer for that... |
**Mat Ryer:** No, genuinely... |
**Kris Brandow:** I've just watched a talk from Strange Loop about regular expressions, and the speaker did go into this, and I've completely forgotten what she said. But we can probably put that talk in the show notes. It was a really good one, about just like the history, like Ken Thompson came up; it was pretty cool... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** When I was a junior, which is the closest to intern I was, I was working with a team lead, and when we deployed something together, we looked at it... And I forget what it was exactly, but this is a company that receives a lot of pings from the SDK of the many clients, and it's all real time. A... |
And then some of the colleagues that were there tried to see where it comes from, and we couldn't figure this out in 15 minutes, and then, bravely, I came to the head of the DevOps team - there was no SRE team at the time - and I said, "I think it's this thing that we did. Can I revert it?" Nobody else from all the oth... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. Well, what a great way to learn stuff though, isn't it? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Break them, yeah. |
**Mat Ryer:** How often does that memory come back to haunt you, Natalie? |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Every time I'm asked, at least... \[laughs\] Every time I get to speak with other junior people. To give the good example of it, obviously, we'll break something, so... |
**Mat Ryer:** Right. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** ...be reasonable about your expectations. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.