Dissecting Google Maps Outage: Cascading Failures
On the 18th of March, 2022, Google Maps faced a major outage affecting millions of people for a couple of hours. The outage happened due to a bad deployment.
Although a bad deployment does not sound too bad, the situation worsens when there are cascading failures if 3 services have a synchronous dependency, forming a chain-like A -> B -> C.
If A goes down, it will have some impact on B, and if the impact is big enough, we might see B going down as well; and extending it, we might see C going down.
This is exactly what happened in this Google Outage. Some services had a bad deployment, and they started crashing. Tile Rendering service depended on it, and the Tile rendering service went down because of retries.
The Direction SDK, Navigation SDK directly invoked the Tile rendering service for rendering the maps, which didn't work, causing a big outage.
How to remediate a bad deployment?
Rollback as soon as possible.
Preventing cascading outages
Reject requests when the server is exhausted
Tune the performance of the webserver and networking stack of the server
Monitor the server resource consumption and set alerts
Add circuit breakers wherever possible.
Here's the video of my explaining this in-depth 👇 do check it out
Google Maps had a global outage on 18th March 2022, during which the end-users were not able to use Directions, Navigation, or Google Maps in general. The outage happened because of a bad rollout, and it lasted more than 2 hours 30 minutes. During the outage, users complained to have seen Gray tiles implying that the map/direction was neither getting initialized nor working.
In this video, we dissect the Google Maps outage and understand what actually happened, how they mitigated it, and, more importantly, understand ways to prevent such an outage and build a robust way of handling cascading failures.
Outline:
00:00 Introducing the outage and impact
02:07 Root cause
08:36 Cascading Failures
12:22 Remediation
13:45 Preventive measures
Incident Report: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/225361510
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Yours truly,
Arpit
arpitbhayani.me
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