Production Staff IDP & BoD Service Outage 2018-08-03

Incident description

During the testing CloudBolt (an interface from which people can order self service VMs) configuration was applied to our configuration management (Puppet) server, which changed configuration on some nodes pointing them to wrong environment (test instead of production). CloudBolt in this configuration, is seen by Puppet as ENC (External Node Classifier). The ENC pushes some configuration to all the servers managed by puppet, and when you use a ENC, you cannot switch the configuration back, and it must be done from CloudBolt. This caused the services to pick the configuration from wrong environment that caused the outage. 

Some other production services environment was also pointed to test but there was no loss of service as the configuration for test and production was same.

Incident severity: CRITICAL

Data loss: NO

Affected Services 

Following services were inaccessible for GEANT staff members during the outage because they all use GEANT Staff IdP for authentication:

• • SharePoint (e.g. Intranet, Partner Portal)
  • GEANT wiki
  • EventR
  • wordpress sites
  • Compendium
  • Filesender
  • FoD
• • Lifesize
  • BOX
  • sympa (lists at prod-lists01.geant.net server)

Cause

• Failure to follow the change management process - needs further investigation. 
• Lack of planning. Preparing an isolated environment would have taken up to a week of work but we have been asked to make this work the same day. Massimiliano Adamo and Michael Haller asked to postpone and to meet on Friday.
•  Massimiliano Adamo asked twice in the meeting for objections and if we intended to take an action. It was a team decision. 
• severe lack of knowledge of puppet integration with CloudBolt, from the side of the consultants. The consultants have been asked repeatedly certain questions and they were either evading the answer or providing wrong replies (i.e.: CloudBolt doesn't provide Agent Bootstrap, but they said it does  This implies that they don't know the implementation details). The consultants have been asked clearly about the environment settings. 

 agents must be pre-installed and configured in the image (from CloudBolt documentation: http://docs.cloudbolt.io/configuration-managers/puppet/index.html )

Timeline

Total downtime: 1.5 hours

Resolution

CloudBolt changes were reverted and all production and UAT VMs were restored back in their environment.