I'm becoming concerned with the rate at which major software systems seem to be failing as of late. For context, last year I only logged four outages that actually disrupted my work; this quarter alone I'm already on my fourth, all within the past few weeks. This is, of course, just an anecdote and not evidence of any wider trend (not to mention that I might not have even logged everything last year), but it was enough to nudge me into writing this today (helped by the fact that I suddenly had some downtime). Keep in mind, this isn't necessarily specific to this outage, just something that's been on my mind enough to warrant writing about it.

It feels like resiliency is becoming a bit of a lost art in networked software. I've spent a good chunk of this year chasing down intermittent failures at work, and I really underestimated how much work goes into shrinking the "blast radius", so to speak, of any bug or outage. Even though we mostly run a monolith, we still depend on a bunch of external pieces like daemons, databases, Redis, S3, monitoring, and third-party integrations, and we generally assume that these things are present and working in most places, which wasn't always the case. My response was to better document the failure conditions, and once I did, realize that there was many more than we initially thought. Since then we've done things like: move some things to a VPS instead of cloud services, automate deployment more than we already had, greatly improve the test suite and docs to include these newly considered failure conditions, and generally cut down on moving parts. It was a ton of effort, but the payoff has finally shown up: our records show fewer surprises which means fewer distractions and a much calmer system overall. Without that unglamorous work, things would've only grown more fragile as complexity crept in. And I worry that, more broadly, we're slowly un-learning how to build systems that stay up even when the inevitable bug or failure shows up.

For completeness, here are the outages that prompted this: the AWS us-east-1 outage in October (took down the Lightspeed R series API), the Azure Front Door outage (prevented Playwright from downloading browsers for tests), today’s Cloudflare outage (took down Lightspeed’s website, which some of our clients rely on), and the Github outage affecting basically everyone who uses it as their git host.