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Postmortem: Outage Incident on Thavmasios Online Store

The Slightly Inconvenient Flash Sale Day
Duration: June 20, 2023, 10:30 AM - June 20, 2023, 1:45 PM (UTC)

Impact: Imagine Black Friday, but on a random Tuesday. Thavmasios Online Store experienced a partial outage, leaving around 35% of our dear customers experiencing service hiccups. It was like Black Friday decided to sneak up on us incognito.

Root Cause: Our store couldn't handle the rush of shoppers during an unexpected flash sale. In simple words, it's like your kitchen sink getting clogged because someone decided to wash a whole watermelon down it.

Timeline:

  • 10:30 AM (UTC): Oh, the horror begins! Our monitoring dashboard showed errors and latencies rising like your electricity bill in winter.
  • 10:35 AM: Bam! An automated alert woke up our sleepy engineers.

  • 10:45 AM: Our tech superheroes grabbed their capes (or in this case, laptops) and began investigating.

  • 11:00 AM: Our initial suspect? The database, feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the attention. We thought, "Maybe it needs some more friends," so we scaled it up.

  • 11:30 AM: Despite our efforts, our database didn't seem satisfied. It was a real diva, still causing trouble.

  • 12:00 PM: With a raised eyebrow, we turned our gaze towards the load balancer. Was it lost in a maze? We thought, "Maybe it's routing everyone to Narnia?" So, it was reconfigured.

  • 1:00 PM: The load balancer looked innocent, so we sent our distress signal to the infrastructure team.

Resolution:
Root Cause: Our lovely website, unprepared for stardom, couldn't handle the sudden rush. It was like trying to fit an elephant through your front door.

Resolution: Finally, we got our act together. We optimized the database, introduced caching like it's a treasure hunt, and upgraded the load balancer to work faster than a caffeine-loaded squirrel.

Corrective and Preventative Measures:
Improvements:

  • We're introducing auto-scaling, like an all-you-can-eat buffet, for critical systems to handle traffic bursts.
  • Our monitoring is getting an upgrade, so we can spot traffic storms on the horizon and batten down the hatches.
  • Database queries are going on a diet and hitting the gym. They need to be lean and mean.
  • We're giving our servers a superhero sidekick in the form of a failover mechanism.

Tasks:

  • Auto-scaling solutions are being rolled out for our infrastructure components.
  • We're boosting monitoring and alerting for swift responses during traffic spikes.
  • A database performance review is underway, along with query optimizations.
  • A failover mechanism is being documented and put in place, just in case things get a bit too exciting again.

Conclusion:
This incident was a wake-up call, like coffee spilled on your favorite book. We're taking steps to ensure our store can handle even the wildest shopping sprees.

So, fear not, dear shoppers! The Thavmasios Online Store is evolving to provide a smoother shopping experience, even during the most unexpected shopping extravaganzas.

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