At 7:00 AM, Linda called. "Why are the morning graphs showing record throughput?"
It was 2:00 AM on a Tuesday. I was on call, nursing a cold brew and watching the dashboards for Stratus Finance , a global payment processor. Our web cluster was pristine: six origin servers humming behind three Web Application Proxy (WAP) servers. The WAPs handled SSL offloading, pre-authentication, and acted as a reverse proxy for our customer-facing APIs. remove web application proxy server from cluster
As I prepared to shut down the virtual machine, I decided to tail the legacy logs one last time. tail -f /var/log/wap/traffic.log on wap-03 . At 7:00 AM, Linda called
At 2:17 AM, I drained the traffic. The F5 showed wap-03 's connection count dropping from 1,200 to 0. Beautiful. At 7:00 AM