tidaldb/docs/runbooks/README.md
jordan fe8d0c87e7 harden: restore CI verification, remove four wire-level fabrications, instrument the 401 path
Implements tmp/tidaldb-fleet-hardening (20 planned tasks + 2 found by measurement).

Ring 0 — restore verification. .woodpecker.yaml step pods ran at the namespace
default of 1500m/2Gi, which OOMKilled a prior pipeline and starved the release
gate past its budget. Both push-path steps now declare
backend_options.kubernetes.resources as two YAML anchors declared once on their
first consuming step. The values are CALIBRATED against measured free node
capacity, not against the LimitRange max: `requests: cpu 2` (this roadmap's
original figure) fits on NO node and would sit Pending forever, because
`ci-build-bounds` grants permission and the nodes supply capacity, and those are
not the same thing.

The `nightly` cron described in this file for 216 days was never created, so
tier-3 chaos, the fault classes, mTLS and the PITR test produced exactly zero
signal while reading like standing coverage. nightly-chaos and
nightly-security-ops now alias the anchors and have budgets matching the gate
(their 120/90 were TIGHTER on the same runner, so they would have failed
nightly for a budget reason, not a correctness one). nightly-soak is REMOVED,
not scheduled: it drives 1000 rps for 600s gating on p99 <= 250ms, and the best
node has 1700m free CPU, so it would fail on starvation rather than regression —
manufacturing a nightly false alarm. Its commands move verbatim to
docs/runbooks/nightly-soak.md.

Ring 1 — four fabrications removed from the wire.
- scatter_merge sorted and truncated without re-stamping rank, so /feed and
  /search returned 1,1,2 under full placement. Reuses merge_cross_shard's
  existing stamp; asserted on BOTH the multi-group merge path and the
  single-group [only] fast path that bypasses it.
- aggregate_region_row's None arm invented `applied_events: 0` plus a deficit
  derived from it. applied_events/lag_events are now Option<u64>, null on the
  wire. leader_last_seq was also unwrap_or(0), so a node that could not reach
  the LEADER computed 0 - applied = 0 for every region and reported a converged
  cluster it had never measured — a fabrication pointing the dangerous way.
- tidalctl inferred NO REPORT from `applied == 0 && lag > 0`. That heuristic was
  actively hiding the PVC-wipe shape: a measured zero with a real deficit
  rendered as "no report" instead of BEHIND. Now read off the wire; converged
  exits 0, partitioned still exits nonzero.
- /sharded/* answered 201/204 for single-copy writes with nothing anywhere
  saying so. Now requires `x-tidal-ack: local`, rejecting with 400 via the
  existing invalid_input path. Six call sites migrated, not the two this
  roadmap predicted — including docs/runbooks/cluster.md §16.3, which told
  operators to run a quorum-write probe via POST /sharded/items. That probe
  cannot verify quorum: the surface applies locally with no WAL append. It was
  used as the safety check between every step of a staged deploy earlier today.

Ring 2 — observability. JSON_LOGS was already implemented and the deployment
simply never asked for it; the StatefulSet now sets it, plus
TIDAL_SERVICE_NAME=tidaldb because enabling it silently renames the
VictoriaLogs `service` stream field and would have blinded every query keyed on
it. Adds tidaldb_usearch_replicated_vectors_total, incremented on BOTH the
origin (wal_blob_first -> Ok(Some)) and the follower apply path — counting only
the origin would mean each vector lands on exactly one node, replicas never
agree, and the alert built on it pages forever.

Found by measurement, not planned: the 401 path discarded every fact about
every rejection. Traefik has served 101,858 rejected requests to the public
ingress — 87.6% of all its traffic — with no record of who or why anywhere.
unauthorized_response now emits reason (missing_token vs invalid_token, the
distinction that separates a scanner from a rotation that missed a consumer)
and the forwarded client. The token is never logged.

Also: scripts/restore-fleet.sh --cluster started the soak monitor while
deliberately leaving its gate suspended, orphaning a watcher that has reported
"0/30 green nights" for 13 days. The pair now moves together. Doc-guard's
three-warning backlog is cleared with real backfill for M4/M6/M12.

Verified: fmt clean; clippy 5 crates 0 new warnings (74 vs 74 baseline,
counted in a detached worktree at HEAD); lib 2110 passed; cluster_sharding 5;
cluster_runbook 10; tidalctl 38; doc-guard 0 warnings. Playwright 32/34 with
the two remaining failures asserting the rank fix against the not-yet-rolled
image — they are the post-deploy proof.
2026-08-30 20:55:58 -06:00

3.0 KiB
Raw Blame History

tidalDB Runbooks — index

Operational documentation for the cluster deployment (ns tidaldb-cluster, single StatefulSet, full-placement RF3, quorum-ack + automatic election). Live state and history live in the orchard9-k3sf repo (cluster-state.yaml, deployments/history/tidaldb.md).

When you need to… Open
Verify a deploy end to end — every layer, with the command and its expected output deploy-verification.md
Respond to an incident / page — symptom → signal → fix on-call.md
Operate the cluster — API, failover, partition, membership, scale, rolling upgrade cluster.md
Run it on Kubernetes — deploy, digest-pin, probes, scale up/down, troubleshoot pods kubernetes.md
Back up / restore / DR — object-store export, restore, byte-verify, query-proof, R2, rebuild disaster-recovery.md
Recover a single node / standalone engine — corrupt keyspace, WAL, lock, schema ../ops/recovery.md
Size a deployment — single-node tables + the measured Ref-A cluster envelope ../ops/capacity-planning.md
Soak before a release — 1000 rps load with p99 / error-rate gates (moved out of CI on 2026-08-30; the shared runner cannot meet a 250ms p99) nightly-soak.md
Read the metrics / wire dashboards & alerts ../ops/observability.md, ../ops/grafana-tidaldb.json, ../ops/prometheus-alerts.yaml
Understand the live perf/topology findings (dev handoff) ../profiling/m12-cluster-deploy-findings.md

Current production facts (2026-06-19)

  • Image: registry.threesix.ai/tidal/server@sha256:171505745b… (m12-writeburst-rc7).
  • Shape: 1 StatefulSet tidaldb, 3 pods = 3 regions = 3 voters, full-placement RF3 (every pod hosts all 3 shard groups; gRPC 9601/9602/9603), HTTPS+mTLS on :9500, metrics :9091.
  • Guarantees live: quorum-ack writes, automatic election/failover, elastic seed-join (learner→voter), inter-node mTLS, per-node Prometheus.
  • Shipped fixes in this image: reseed-loop resolved, seed-join promotion, election-divergence/quarantine, read-SLA (CPU oversubscription), and the write-burst false-partition fix.
  • Known limits: read p99 ≤10 ms to ~1000 rps (ceiling ~11.5k/s, CPU-bound); write knee ~250 rps; soak at 200 rps; 1M corpus needs >16 GiB nodes; 2.5× write-scaling needs ≥5 nodes + partitioned placement.
  • Must-watch signal: tidaldb_cluster_peer_breaker_state (0/1/2) — a live peer stuck at 1 is the write-burst/partition pattern.

Alert rules in ../ops/prometheus-alerts.yaml are accurate but design-reference — not yet loaded by the live Prometheus. Promoting them to a PrometheusRule is the one open observability step (see on-call.md §3).