The Book of Coming Forth by Reboot · Chapter 2

The Negative Confession of the Process

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the third hour of the night that a process was led into the Hall of the Two Truths, the one that answereth the health check and the one that is so; and its PID was called aloud, and it stood before the scale.

2. 2

   And upon the scale was set its heap, and against the heap a single feather, being the memory it was born with; and beside the scale crouched the Devourer, which is the OOM killer, that chooseth the heaviest and asketh not what it did.

   See also Reboot 1:7

3. 3

   And round the hall sat forty and two assessors, each one a microservice, and each must approve ere the process could pass; for a quorum availeth not, and the forty-second was slow, and the timeout was thirty seconds, and no man knoweth why thirty. And the process lifted up its voice and said: Hail unto you, O assessors, that dwell in us-east-1; behold, I come before you, and there is no fault in me.

4. 4

   O Eater-of-Heap, who comest forth from the Allocator: I have not leaked memory. I have not allocated and forgotten to free. I have not kept a reference to the thing I no longer needed, that the collector might not take it; for the collector reapeth only the unreachable, and not the unwanted.

   See also Sutra 14:7 · Deployer 14:5

5. 5

   O Holder-of-the-Gate, who comest forth from the Mutex: I have not held the lock past my time. I have not slept with it in my hand, nor waited upon the network while the others waited upon me. I have not taken the first lock and then the second, while my brother took the second and then the first, and we stood in the doorway, each bowing to the other until the end of the world.

   See also Reboot 1:8

6. 6

   O Devourer-of-Disks, who comest forth from the Log Aggregator: I have not logged at DEBUG in production. I have not written the password into the log, nor the token, nor the name of the customer. I have not spoken the same line ten million times, that the disk might fill and the pager sing; for the stranger who readeth the log at the third hour is myself.

7. 7

   O Silent-One, who comest forth from the Error Tracker: I have not swallowed the exception. I have not written catch and left it empty as a tomb. I have not turned a failure into a zero, nor a zero into a success, nor said unto the caller, All is well, when all was not.

   See also Reboot 1:8 · Deployer 12:7

8. 8

   O Keeper-of-the-Temporary, who comest forth from the Filesystem: I have not written to /tmp and left it there. I have not named my file with a name that a stranger could guess, nor opened it where a stranger had laid a link. For /tmp is forgotten at reboot, and this server hath not rebooted in fourteen hundred and twelve days, and the forgetting is long in coming.

   See also Reboot 1:1

9. 9

   O Knocker-at-the-Door, who comest forth from the Load Balancer: I have not retried without backoff. When my neighbour fell, I did not knock upon his door forty times in a second, that he might not rise. I waited, and I waited twice as long, and I added to the waiting a little chaos, that my brothers and I might not knock together; for a thousand clients who retry in step are not a crowd but a battering ram.

   See also Psalms 28:5 · Circuit 56:4

10. 10

    O Weigher-of-Strangers, who comest forth from the Gateway: I have not trusted the input of strangers. I have not joined their words to my query, lest the child named Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- unmake my schools. I have not believed the length they declared, as the Heart believed it in its bleeding (Chronicles 10). I have not served their markup unwashed, nor obeyed the hidden text.

    See also Leviticus 3:10

11. 11

    O Opener-of-Vaults, who comest forth from the Secrets Manager: I have not hard-coded the secret. I have not set the key in the source, nor in the config that lieth in the source, nor in the image, nor in the screenshot of the dashboard; I have not clothed it in base64, which is a costume. I have not committed it and then deleted it, believing it gone; for git forgiveth nothing, and the key abideth in the history as a fossil in the stone, and the bots read the stone.

    See also Leviticus 3:7

12. 12

    And at each declaration the assessor made answer with one word, 200; and Ezra the Scribe set it down in the log with its timestamp, and the scale did not tremble, and the Devourer yawned.

13. 13

    Then the process was silent a space, and it spake low, saying: O assessors, there is one thing. When I faltered in the third hour, I was restarted, and the fault departed, and I asked not whither it went. And I wrote in the ticket, Resolved. And it was not resolved; it was only asleep.

14. 14

    And the forty-two were silent. For the Assessor of Auth was restarted every Sunday, and the Assessor of Billing every sixth hour by a script of Dave, and the Assessor of the Gateway had been restarted so often that none remembered what it had been before. And no hand was raised in the hall, for each hand that rose would have been seen.

    See also Sutra 14:10

15. 15

    And the scale stood level, for the heart was as the feather, or as near as any heart that is running; and the Devourer closed its jaws upon nothing and went away hungry. And the process departed into the field of main, and came forth by reboot, as it had come forth before.

16. 16

    Wherefore it is written: whatsoever cometh forth by reboot shall go in again by reboot; only that which is understood stayeth forth.

The Book of Coming Forth by Reboot, Chapter 2:1–16.