A recent GCN got me thinking about invisible infrastructure - the quiet magic that we take for granted…until it ceases to exist. _PIE is still trying to figure out _ exactly what happened, but my understanding is that a restart of named - which is typically a routine operation with zero impact - went…well…went all atypical on us. DNS resolution is such a fundamental underpinning technology that when it goes away - even briefly! - Shit Gets Weird.
I kind of liken it to gravity. I’m a fan of “What If?”, and a question I’d like to pose is “What if gravity stopped working for one second?” My hunch? The Most Major of Major GCNs. Everything we build, everything we do, all of it assumes a constant inward acceleration of 9.8m/s/s. Beyond Earth/humanity, gravity is a fundamental force that dictates how the entire Universe works. (In case you didn’t click through to the Wikipedia article, I’d like to call attention to the bit about “Affected particles: All particles”.) So what would happen if gravity just “stopped gravitying” for a second. …and - perhaps even worse - what would happen in the following second, when it came back? I’m not Randall Munroe…my mind gets itself in a twist even trying to think about the implications.
So…what did this GCN “look like”? Well, I could show you any number of inGraphs demonstrating maxed out threadpools, error rates, ermahgerd lerterncer, etc. Instead, I’m going to pass along this nifty little inGraph that Henry Majoros called to my attention; rotated 90 degrees, it bears a striking resemblance to a Christmas tree:
Merry Christmas, folks!