Anatomy of a Production Kubernetes Outage – Kubecon EU 2018

Dive into a production Kubernetes outage that Monzo experienced a few months ago, its causes and effects, and the architectural and operational lessons learned.

1. Anatomy of a Production
 Kubernetes Outage ! Oliver Beattie Head of Engineering, Monzo Bank
6. You've spent £35.50 today ! £10 at Tiger now MONZO Wednesday, 2 May 5:10
7. > 500 micro services Built on open source software
8. Story of an outage
9. CAST OF CHARACTERS " Kubernetes etcd Linkerd Humans #
10. etcd upgrade ⏰ 2 WEEKS BEFORE THE OUTAGE
11. Deployment of faulty service Scaled to zero replicas ⏰ 1 DAY BEFORE THE OUTAGE
12. ⏰ START OF PARTIAL OUTAGE Ledger change deployed
13. Ledger change rolled back ⏰ 2 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
14. Linkerd identified as unhealthy ⏰ 6 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
15. Begin restarting Linkerd pods ⏰ 16 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
16. New Linkerd pods cannot start Kubernetes apiserver restarted ⏰ 27 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
17. Finish restarting Linkerd pods ⏰ ESCALATED TO TOTAL OUTAGE 1 HR 3 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
18. Linkerd NullPointerException
 observed on start up ⏰ 1 HR 17 MINS INTO THE OUTAGE
19. Linkerd/k8s incompatibility found Empty services deleted ⏰ END OF OUTAGE 1 HR 21 MINS
20. IMPACT % 1 hour, 21 mins of cluster downtime Vast majority of payments succeeded throughout
21. ROOT CAUSES ! Bug in gRPC client library affecting etcd Incompatibility between Kubernetes + Linkerd
22. "endpoints": [] V K8S < 1.6
23. "endpoints": [] VS. "endpoints": null K8S < 1.6 K8S 1.6+
24. ROOT CAUSES ! Bug in gRPC client library affecting etcd Incompatibility between Kubernetes + Linkerd Human error
25. LESSONS & Defence in depth
26. Mastercard
 Banknet 
 Mastercard
 processor AWS PHYSICAL
 DATA CENTRES 
 Mastercard
 proxy 
 Ledger
27. Mastercard
 Banknet 
 Mastercard
 processor AWS PHYSICAL
 DATA CENTRES 
 Mastercard
 proxy 
 Ledger '
28. LESSONS & Chaos engineering
29. “Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a distributed system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.”
30. LESSONS ( More monitoring, more visible
31. LESSONS & Be transparent; embrace the community
34. monzo.com/careers
35. @obeattie