Imagine, if you will, a series of tragic tales from dark dimensions where nightmares come to life and best practices go to die. The stories you’re about to witness are all true, pieced together from the shattered psyches of those who lived to tell the tales. Accounts have been anonymized to safeguard the unfortunate souls who were caught in the crosshairs of catastrophe.

As you follow this motley crew of unsuspecting engineers navigating the murky waters of automation, integration, and delivery, each alarming anecdote will become another foreboding reminder that it could all happen to you one day.

Prepare for downtime, disasters, and dilemmas. Your pulse will quicken and your hardware will cringe as you travel through the hair-raising vortex of DevOps Nightmares…

When your offline feature goes offline

A tale of missed connections and DevOps lessons in the streaming biz

Offline downloads are one of the most cherished features of movie and TV streaming services. You take a tablet on an airplane and binge watch until your eyes turn red, just as nature intended. But what happens when you whip out your tablet and your offline videos don’t play?

Terror? Anxiety? Visions of actually talking to the person sitting next to you? Eek!

Let’s hear the tale of Mr. A, a DevOps Engineer at an entertainment platform SaaS. In early 2021, this is the situation his company faced and he was at the helm to fix it.

Weeks of testing a new release and no one could have predicted this

Mr. A’s company was about to release a major update that included a new feature allowing users to watch content offline. They’d been meticulously testing the update internally for weeks, and everything seemed flawless. “Our confidence grew with each successful test run,” shares Mr. A.

A typical tale in the land of DevOps failures. Only this time, the company can’t tell customers “it worked on our machines.”

Launch day arrived, and they deployed the update with a celebratory sigh of relief. But within minutes, user reports started flooding in. The offline feature was broken! Users who downloaded content for offline viewing were met with error messages and unplayable videos.

Just think of all the disgruntled airline passengers! Mr. A continues: “Our DevOps team dug into the issue. Logs showed everything deployed correctly, and all infrastructure seemed healthy. The finger pointed towards the new offline functionality itself. But how did it pass all our internal testing?”

Good question! How did it happen?

How it happened

As they investigated further, a horrifying truth emerged. “Our automated testing suite, designed for scalability and speed, relied heavily on mocked data. This mocked data bypassed the actual process of downloading and storing content offline. The tests validated the application logic, but they completely missed the functionality's interaction with our storage infrastructure.”

This is what you call a “yikes.”

The fix required a complete overhaul of the offline feature’s testing. They had to create a new test environment that mirrored real-world user interactions with the storage system — but for realsies this time. Not only was it a pain to get this going, but it also significantly slowed down their dev cycle. 

“The launch fiasco tarnished our reputation and resulted in a loss of user trust,” admits Mr. A. “It exposed a critical gap in our DevOps pipeline — a lack of comprehensive end-to-end testing that incorporated the entire infrastructure.”

Lessons learned from fake testing

Every rose has its thorn and every DevOps failure has its lessons learned. Here’s what Mr. A took away: “This nightmare emphasized the importance of shifting our testing strategy left – focusing on integrating infrastructure testing early in the development lifecycle. We revamped our DevOps pipeline to include automated infrastructure testing alongside traditional unit and integration tests.”

The consequences weren’t easy. The company had a lot to clean up:

• Loss of user trust for future updates

• Broken launch promises leading to loss of internal confidence

• Development slowdown meaning less value to market over time

• Reputational damage (let’s hope they weren’t publicly traded!)

• Exposed DevOps shortcomings led to a re-evaluation of what was happening behind the scenes

The pains of 2021 are long behind us, thankfully, and offline video download issues are a thing of the past for Mr. A and his SaaS. And thank goodness for that! Summer’s coming and I need my kids zonked out on our upcoming family road trip.

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Have your own tales of automation woes or delivery disasters? We want to hear them! If you've endured a devastating DevOps debacle and are willing to anonymously share the cringe-worthy details, please reach out to us at DevOpsStory@aptible.com.

Don’t hold back or hide the scars of your most frightening system scares. Together, we can immortalize the valuable lessons within your darkest DevOps hours. Your therapy is our treasured content, and we’ll gracefully craft your organizational mishap into a cautionary case study for the ages. And, in return for your candor, we'll ship some sweet swag your way as thanks.