Bigtable Automation Wipes Everything

Text on the meme

Chapter 7 - The Evolution of Automation at Google Failing to configure one subsystem, or configuring a system or component differently than other deployments, is a customer-impacting outage waiting to happen. In one case, a multi-petabyte Bigtable cluster was configured to not use the first (logging) disk on 12-disk systems, for latency reasons. A year later, some automation assumed that if a machine’s first disk wasn’t being used, that machine didn’t have any storage configured; therefore, it was safe to wipe the machine and set it up from scratch. All of the Bigtable data was wiped, instantly.

What it means

A screenshot of a Google chapter about automation shows a multi-petabyte Bigtable cluster being wiped because an automation system misunderstood why the first disk was unused. The joke is the horrifying contrast between a seemingly reasonable configuration assumption and the instant destruction of all stored data, making it a reaction to catastrophic software mistakes, outages, or overconfident automation.

Objects

web browser window / окно веб-браузера browser address bar / адресная строка браузера Google documentation page / страница документации Google blue navigation bar / синяя панель навигации hamburger menu icon / значок меню-гамбургера text paragraphs / текстовые абзацы computer screen / экран компьютера Bigtable cluster / кластер Bigtable hard disk / жёсткий диск server machine / серверная машина data wipe / удаление данных