Diagnosing a Race Condition Bug in AWS Aurora RDS During Infrastructure Upgrade
By
theanomaly
Master baker tier. Every paragraph earns its place on the tray.
Summary
The article details how a team discovered and diagnosed a race condition bug in AWS Aurora RDS during an infrastructure upgrade attempt on October 23rd. After experiencing issues during a planned upgrade to increase event handling throughput (following the October 20th AWS outage), the team methodically investigated the problem, eventually determining it was an AWS bug that affected database failovers. The article walks through their diagnostic process, how they confirmed the issue with AWS support, and shares lessons learned about working with cloud infrastructure and race conditions.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWhen we attempted that infrastructure upgrade on October 23rd, we ran into yet another race condition bug in Aurora RDS.
This is the story of how we figured out it was an AWS bug (later confirmed by AWS) and what we learned.
The backlog of events we needed to process from that outage on the 20th stretched our system to the limits, and so we decided to increase our headroom for event handling throughput.
Much of the developer world is familiar with the AWS outage in us-east-1 that occurred on October 20th due to a race condition bug inside a DNS management service.
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