Celery Beat Service Outage

Summary:

• Incident Date & Time: September 1, 2023, from 12:01 PM EST to 1:22 PM EST
• Affected Service: Celery Beat
• Root Cause: Unforeseen hardware failure of the instance hosting Celery Beat

Incident Details:
During the period of September 1, 2023, from 12:01 PM EST to 1:22 PM EST, our Celery Beat service experienced an outage, resulting in periodic tasks not processing as expected. These tasks were accumulating in the queue, causing disruption to our operations. The primary cause of this incident was the unexpected failure and subsequent termination of the instance hosting the Celery Beat service.

Actions Taken:
Upon detecting the issue, our incident response team promptly initiated recovery procedures. Initially, we attempted to launch a new instance with the same configuration as the failed instance. Regrettably, these attempts ended in failure due to unanticipated complications.
To expedite service restoration and mitigate the risk of recurrence, we made the following critical decisions:

• Instance Family Change: We transitioned to a more robust instance family with enhanced hardware capabilities. This change was aimed at reducing the likelihood of hardware-related failure.
• Increased Instance Power: We selected a more powerful instance type to improve the launch speed and overall performance of the Celery Beat service.

Resolution:
With the aforementioned adjustments in place, we successfully launched a new instance, and the Celery Beat service was fully restored.
Root Cause Analysis:
The initial failure was challenging to predict or prevent since it was attributed to a hardware problem within the instance hosting the Celery Beat service. Hardware failures can be unpredictable and fall outside the scope of traditional preventive measures.