Cover art for The Day the Server Died

WPA3-KCIA Radio · Single

The Day the Server Died

Jarrett Heintz · 5:15

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Lyrics

  1. A long long time ago
  2. I can still re-mem-ber how that ser-ver used to purr and sing
  3. And I knew if I had to fix that sys-tem's parts, pro-duc-tion mix,
  4. I'd have to shut it off for some time
  5. But the C-I-S-O mem-o made me shiv-er
  6. The B-I-A we must de-liv-er
  7. Bad news for all the ad-mins
  8. They could not fake one more step
  9. I can't re-mem-ber if I cried
  10. When I read the text to come in-side
  11. But some-thing touched me deep in-side
  12. The day our ser-ver died
  13. My my this new node went and died
  14. RAID and backups didn’t stack up and our app went offline
  15. Failover missed the heartbeat, kiss our uptime goodbye
  16. Yelling SLA today or you're fried
  17. Destruction of what's there undenied
  18. Did you write the patch in time
  19. Or trust AV to catch the crime
  20. When ransomware came knocking?
  21. Do you believe in least privilege
  22. Or give prod creds to the QA bridge
  23. And hope the auditors don’t say you're shocking?
  24. Now I know you’re in a panic state
  25. ’Cause DR tests were months too late
  26. We thought our snapshots saved us
  27. But retention never gave us
  28. A way to resurrect the node
  29. Logs corrupted, data overflowed
  30. It’s all a twisted, tragic ode
  31. The day our server died
  32. My my this new node went and died
  33. RAID and backups didn’t stack up and our app went offline
  34. Failover missed the heartbeat, kiss our uptime goodbye
  35. Yelling SLA today or you're fried
  36. Destruction of what's there undenied
  37. Now for ten years we've run the stack
  38. VMs nested on a nested rack
  39. But that was then…before the fire
  40. When the cooling failed at 2 AM
  41. And alerts got stuck in some DM
  42. And ops was home asleep, their phone on silent wire
  43. While SOC and NOC both passed the buck
  44. Said, “Try rebooting, push your luck,”
  45. Security said, “Contain it,”
  46. Infra yelled, “You can’t restrain it!”
  47. And while compliance choked on PCI
  48. We watched the dashboard flatline dry
  49. Rebuild scripts failed, we asked them why
  50. The day our server died
  51. My my this new node went and died
  52. RAID and backups didn’t stack up and our app went offline
  53. Failover missed the heartbeat, kiss our uptime goodbye
  54. Yelling SLA today or you're fried
  55. Destruction of what's there undenied
  56. Helter skelter in a hot data center
  57. Engineers praying to a metrics mentor
  58. Eight hours outage and climbing higher
  59. We tried containers, we tried the cloud
  60. We tried to scale but weren’t allowed
  61. ’Cause finance cut our budget to a wire
  62. And as I watched the final logs
  63. Scroll past like ghosts in dusty cogs
  64. I swore we'd build it stronger
  65. Zero trust and tests much longer
  66. But the CISO said with hardened eyes
  67. “Resilience fails when you rely
  68. On hope instead of verified”
  69. The day our server died
  70. So my my this old node went and died
  71. But we’ll rebuild it with some rigor and a DR guide
  72. Next time failover hits, we won’t be terrified
  73. Singing uptime’s not a prayer, it’s applied
  74. Uptime’s not a prayer, it’s applied