Thankful for incidents: embracing chaos to find clarity

Tines software engineer Shayon Mukherjee recounts an incident involving a Redis cluster upgrade that revealed a hidden bug in the platform's webhook system, highlighting the importance of comprehensive testing and platform resilience. During the upgrade, a connectivity issue in the dedicated listener thread for Redis Pub/Sub led to service degradation, as new webhook requests could not be processed. This incident exposed a critical vulnerability in the system's architecture, particularly the reliance on a single listener thread without a robust fail-open mechanism. The experience underscored the necessity for a holistic view of system dependencies and resilience, prompting Tines to implement improvements such as reconciliation loops for the singleton thread and periodic chaos testing to better withstand similar issues in the future. Mukherjee emphasizes that incidents are inevitable in complex systems and serve as valuable opportunities for learning and improvement.