There Are No Repeat Incidents

Honeycomb's experience with two seemingly identical outages highlights the nuanced nature of incident management and the importance of learning from each event. The first incident in December 2021 involved a significant disruption during their EC2 to EKS migration, as AWS SSM failures led to a prolonged outage in the us-east-1 region, prompting improvisational solutions to maintain operations. Despite the complexity and rarity of this event, the team focused on examining their adaptive responses rather than implementing specific preventative measures. In September 2022, a similar issue occurred, but the team's prior experience allowed for a more organized and efficient response, as they quickly identified the problem and leveraged previous investigations to mitigate the impact. This time, they introduced new strategies such as setting up configuration mirrors and automating region-specific solutions, demonstrating that while no two incidents are truly identical, accumulated knowledge and experience can significantly alter the management and outcome of subsequent incidents.