The Consul outage that never happened

GitLab.com, a large high-availability instance of GitLab, faced a critical incident when an expired TLS certificate for its database servers threatened to disrupt operations across its 271 production servers, serving four million users and 12 million projects. The incident arose because a test certificate, initially meant for a proof-of-concept installation, had been inadvertently used in production without proper transition planning. The globally distributed infrastructure team, consisting of 20 to 24 engineers, tackled the issue by disabling certificate validation temporarily, allowing time to implement a more robust, long-term solution without causing downtime. They devised a plan to restart all Consul services simultaneously using the Linux 'at' command, ensuring encrypted connections could re-establish without disruption. Despite the complexity and risk of the situation, the team successfully navigated the incident by leveraging both modern tools and traditional system administration techniques, ultimately maintaining service continuity and demonstrating the importance of thorough planning and a deep understanding of system operations.

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