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Comment by SerCe | Hacker News Reader

As always, kudos for releasing a post mortem in less than 24 hours after the outage, very few tech organisations are capable of doing this.

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I'm curious about how their internal policies work such that they are allowed to publish a post mortem this quickly, and with this much transparency.

Any other large-ish company, there would be layers of "stakeholders" that will slow this process down. They will almost always never allow code to be published.

The person who posted both this blog article and the hacker news post, is Matthew Prince, one of highly technical billionaire founders of cloudflare. I'm sure if he wants something to happen, it happens.

I'm sure he wanted traffic to flow for those few hours but it didn't :p

I mean the CEO posted the post-mortem so there aren't that many layers of stakeholders above. For other post-mortems by engineers, Matthew once said that the engineering team is running the blog and that he wouldn't event know how to veto even if he wanted [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45588305

From what I've observed, it depends on whether you're an "engineering company" or not.

Well… we have a culture of transparency we take seriously. I spent 3 years in law school that many times over my career have seemed like wastes but days like today prove useful. I was in the triage video bridge call nearly the whole time. Spent some time after we got things under control talking to customers. Then went home. I’m currently in Lisbon at our EUHQ. I texted John Graham-Cumming, our former CTO and current Board member whose clarity of writing I’ve always admired. He came over. Brought his son (“to show that work isn’t always fun”). Our Chief Legal Officer (Doug) happened to be in town. He came over too. The team had put together a technical doc with all the details. A tick-tock of what had happened and when. I locked myself on a balcony and started writing the intro and conclusion in my trusty BBEdit text editor. John started working on the technical middle. Doug provided edits here and there on places we weren’t clear. At some point John ordered sushi but from a place with limited delivery selection options, and I’m allergic to shellfish, so I ordered a burrito. The team continued to flesh out what happened. As we’d write we’d discover questions: how could a database permission change impact query results? Why were we making a permission change in the first place? We asked in the Google Doc. Answers came back. A few hours ago we declared it done. I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate. I sent a draft to Michelle, who’s in SF. The technical teams gave it a once over. Our social media team staged it to our blog. I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did. That was the process.

Appreciate the extra transparency on the process.

You call this transparency, but fail to answer the most important questions: what was in the burrito? Was it good? Would you recommend?

Chicken burrito from Coyo Taco in Lisbon. I am not proud of this. It’s worse than ordering from Chipotle. But there are no Chipotle’s in Lisbon… yet.

There's a lot of good food places in Lisbon that you might not be familiar with yet. Enjoy your stay

I DON'T see this as transparency. There is ZERO mention of the burrito in the post-mortem document itself.

0/10, get it right the first time, folks. (/s)

> I texted John to see if he wanted to post it to HN. He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did

Damn corporate karma farming is ruthless, only a couple minute SLA before taking ownership of the karma. I guess I'm not built for this big business SLA.

We're in a Live Fast Die Young karma world. If you can't get a TikTok ready with 2 minutes of the post modem drop, you might as well quit and become a barista instead.

How do you guys handle redaction? I'm sure even when trusted individuals are in charge of authoring, there's still a potential of accidental leakage which would probably be best mitigated by a team specifically looking for any slip ups.

Thanks for the insight.

Team has a good sense, typically. In this case, the names of the columns in the Bot Management feature table seemed sensitive. The person who included that in the master document we were working from added a comment: “Should redact column names.” John and I usually catch anything the rest of the team may have missed. For me, pays to have gone to law school, but also pays to have studied Computer Science in college and be technical enough to still understand both the SQL and Rust code here.

Could you elaborate a bit on how going to law school helped? Was it because it made it easier for you to communicate and align with your CLO?

Probably because he could check legalities of a release himself without council. It is probably equivalent to educating yourself on your rights and laws so if you get pulled over by a cop who may try to do things that you can legally refuse, you can say no.

A very human and authentic response. Love to see it.

Fantastic for recruiting, too.

> He didn’t reply after a few minutes so I did

I'd consider applying based on this alone

that's very cool, thanks

A postmortem postmortem, I love it. Transparency to the power of 2.

> I read it top-to-bottom out loud for Doug, John, and John’s son. None of us were happy — we were embarrassed by what had happened — but we declared it true and accurate.

I'm so jealous. I've written postmortems for major incidents at a previous job: a few hours to write, a week of bikeshedding by marketing and communication and tech writers and ... over any single detail in my writing. Sanitizing (hide a part), simplifying (our customers are too dumb to understand), etc, so that the final writing was "true" in the sense that it "was not false", but definitely not what I would call "true and accurate" as an engineer.

I'm not sure I've ever read something from someone so high up in a company that gave me such a strong feeling for "I'd like to work for these people". If job posts could be so informal and open ended, this post could serve as one in the form of a personality fit litmus test.

I really appreciate this level of transparency. Thank you for being a good person in such a powerful position in the world.

Cloudflare seems to have baked this level of transparency into their culture and incident response process

And a well-written one at that. Compared to the AWS port-mortem this could be literature.

Except it fails to document anything about the actions they made to Warp in London during the resolution.

There’s lots of things we did while we were trying to track down and debug the root cause that didn’t make it into the post. Sorry the WARP takedown impacted you. As I said in a comment above, it was the result of us (wrongly) believing that this was an attack targeting WARP endpoints in our UK data centers. That turned out to be wrong but based on where errors initially spiked it was a reasonable hypothesis we wanted to rule out.

Thanks!

* published less than 12 hours from when the incident began. Proud of the team for pulling together everything so quickly and clearly.

That's all well & good, but I'm curious...

> Spent some time after we got things under control talking to customers. Then went home.

What did sama / Fidji say? ;) Turnstile couldn't have been worth that.

It's not just a PR-friendly summary either... they included real technical detail, timestamps, even code snippets

Plenty are capable. Most don't bother.

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