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Inside the longest Atlassian outage

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Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#511

Engineering mistakes happen. The most inexcusable thing is not communicating with the paying customers who have been affected for over a week. Atlassian's Global Head of Customer Success probably should have been fired but here she is promoting Atlassian Cloud on LinkedIn three days ago: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/gertie-rizzo-5b70061 Actually reading a bit more, it seems like their customer team was partying…

They claim they test backups quarterly yet they don't have a procedure in place to restore the operation. We all know your backup is not tested until you restored everything successfully. This is not an engineering mistake, it is a flat out lie.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#512
post #2

Selectively restoring data only for certain rows is super hard. But the communications by Atlassian has been the worst I have ever seen in the industry.

Hi, this is Mike from Atlassian Engineering. You are right the communications from us have not lived up to our standard. We will focus on this specifically once we restore service and get the post incident review out there. More details here: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/april-2022-outage-upda...

[deleted]

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every business can afford to go one month without income. What's the best thing for customers? Have the business go bankrupt and irremediably lose access to the service?

It's 400 clients, not all their user base. They can handle the lost income from a small slice of their customers for one month. And if they can't sustain that, then it's even more imperative that those customers migrate away.

Atlassian had almost a billion in free cashflow last year and over a billion in cash. I think they should cover the whole year for these customers.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#514

Engineering mistakes happen. The most inexcusable thing is not communicating with the paying customers who have been affected for over a week. Atlassian's Global Head of Customer Success probably should have been fired but here she is promoting Atlassian Cloud on LinkedIn three days ago: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/gertie-rizzo-5b70061 Actually reading a bit more, it seems like their customer team was partying…

No argument on the crappy comms.

If I was in customer success at an enterprise vendor I doubt I'd be let anywhere near the tools to get this back up and running. These guys are generally in the way rather than helping in a situation like this.

Head of engineering or some product rather than customer support? That might be a different outcome.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#515

Regarding the backup restores: I once worked a company that had a data loss issue. There was nothing else we could do, we had exhausted every option we had over almost 40 hours. At the end of the second day, it was decided to restore from backup. We had done this before, as a test. It took about 12 hours to restore the data and another 12 hours to import the data and get back up and running. One small thing was diffe…

Hi, I'm Mike and I work in Engineering at Atlassian. Here's our approach to backup and data management: https://www.atlassian.com/trust/security/data-management - we certainly have the backups and have a restore process that we keep to. However, this incident stressed our ability to do this at scale, which has led to the very long times to restore.

How’s the atmosphere internally Mike? Must be crazy times there. I know this isn’t your fault, so hang in there. Cheers!

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"permanently delete" strongly suggests to me that it was the "medical and financial data" kind of compliance. If data can be restored, it's not permanently deleted. But this was a statement from the CEO, so words can have arbitrary meaning :)

"permanently delete" does not mean the same thing as "immediately delete". deleting from the live database is the first step of a permanent deletion, as long as the data exists somewhere the deletion process is still in-progress. there's a whole lot of people in here who are way too quick to assume that just because one part of a permanent deletion process was inadvertently triggered and then caught while they still…

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

You seem to be right-ish, while the gdpr in certain circumstances allows you to keep backups of data that should have been deleted it seems like they are trying to discourage it in the future.

> ...It is, however, important to note that where data put beyond use is still held it might need to be provided in response to a court order. Therefore data controllers should work towards technical solutions to prevent deletion problems recurring in the future.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#518
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on what you mean by compliance. Some regulations require you to irreversibly destroy data when they prescribe the destruction of that data. That can mean as much as "you have to encrypt everything with a separate key, so that you can destroy the key for the given (say, personally identifiable) dataset making its retrieval irrecoverable" I'm not saying that's the particular compliance reason they…

"permanently delete" strongly suggests to me that it was the "medical and financial data" kind of compliance. If data can be restored, it's not permanently deleted. But this was a statement from the CEO, so words can have arbitrary meaning :)

A better way to do this sort of thing is not an actual "delete", but a "cryptographic delete". The data should be encrypted, and you just delete the key. The data is then unrecoverable everywhere, including backups. Of course you probably don't want to just nuke the key, but disable it for some period of time, and then nuke it.

Re: Inside the longest Atlassian outage

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* makes it much harder to distribute your tables by any other factor, for whatever reason (usually performance, sometimes archival) * disaggregates data that the SaaS might be interested in querying/updating as an aggregate * not all ORM frameworks handle this case well, if at all * dumps are more than a single trivial command basically all your data operations gain an additional dimension of complexity, and you may…

Would it be fair to estimate that the majority of SaaS companies aren't sharding like this then? Seems like a lot of downsides that impact everything often except for backups, which you'd restore rarely.

Per-customer is a common sharding strategy for noSQL databases, so it may not be entirely uncommon.
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