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Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues

Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2023–2024.

Kevin Fang

comedy · evergreen

Open on YouTube

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Shared as a funny, accurate retelling of a classic outage, especially on a bad ops day.

people recommended it
1
separate months
1
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2023–2024
“The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day.”
— xyst, Aug 2024, in “Gitlab is reportedly up for sale”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

xystAug 2024Recommends

Every time GL is mentioned, I am reminded of the 2017 incident where a person 'rm -rf' the primary pg data logs. The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day. ▶ this video It’s a shame they are selling out, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. GH is vacuuming up all of the market share. I kind of liked the ability to self host my own GL. But for small/personal use cases. It was a bit overkill.

in “Gitlab is reportedly up for sale” · View on HN

laserDinosaurSep 2023Cites it

"When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." Which sounds good in theory, until you run into issues like this: ▶ this video TLDW: Most of the Gitlabs outage where they deleted the primary prod and backup prod database could have been solved if they just waited for the command line op to complete - but because of a lack of feedback they thought it had frozen, leading to several other plans which made the situation worse.

in “Nginx Unit – Universal web app server” · View on HN

sovietmudkipzJul 2023Cites it

Here is a retelling of the time when gitlab went down because someone deleted a production database: "Dev Deletes Entire Production Database, Chaos Ensues" ▶ this video

in “Gitlab.com is down” · View on HN

renegade-otterApr 2024Joke

If the primary fails, will the replica fail over? How do you know? Are the backups working? Who's checking? Can anyone delete a directory when tired at 6PM on a Friday? ▶ this video

in “ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilityDatabases & storageSatire & parodygitlabpostmortemproduction databasedevopsincident