Post-Mortem: Recovering from a 3-Tier Multi-Cloud Outage with 0% Data Loss
An authentic SRE post-mortem detailing how our engineering team diagnosed a split-brain network partition, promoted standby database replicas, and restored 100% service in under 12 minutes.
Sikander Ali
Senior DevOps Architect
Executive Engineering Summary & Takeaways
- Root cause analysis of an unannounced upstream cloud network partition causing primary database timeout cascading.
- Immediate execution of automated failover playbooks promoting hot standby read-replicas in under 90 seconds.
- Implementation of PgBouncer circuit-breakers and chaos engineering simulations to prevent future cascading failures.
1. Incident Timeline & Automated Failover Runbook
At 03:14 UTC, our automated Prometheus alert fired. Within 90 seconds, automated failover playbooks promoted the standby RDS replica to primary, restoring 100% service with zero data loss.
#!/usr/bin/env bash aws rds promote-read-replica --db-instance-identifier prod-postgres-replica-1 aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id Z1234567890 --change-batch file://update-cname-cutover.json
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