🚨 THE ON-CALL HOWLING 🚨

3:47 AM

The PagerDuty alert pierced through Wolfy's sleep like a fire alarm. Actually, worse than a fire alarm—it was a CRITICAL: P0 INCIDENT.

The Kubernetes cluster was dying. 67% of pods in CrashLoopBackOff. API gateway timing out. Customer-facing services completely down. Revenue: bleeding at $50k per minute.

Wolfy stumbled to his desk, tail dragging, ears still half-asleep. His Slack was exploding.

He joined the Zoom call. Twelve people. All panicking. The CTO, the VP of Engineering, three senior engineers, the CEO (why is the CEO awake?!), and Wolfy.

"All pods are crashing. No clear error messages. Happened simultaneously at 3:42 AM." - Senior Engineer #1

"Rollback isn't working. Even old versions are crashing now." - Senior Engineer #2

"Database connections look fine... this doesn't make sense." - Wolfy, squinting at metrics

But something was bothering him. A pattern. The crashes started exactly at 3:42 AM. All services at once. Like something external triggered it.

4:03 AM - 16 minutes into the incident

They'd tried everything:

Wolfy's tail was twitching. Not from stress. From... something else. A pattern recognition. The way the crashes cascaded. It reminded him of...

"Wait." Wolfy's ears perked up. "Pull up the network logs."

Senior Engineer #1 shared his screen. There it was. A DNS resolution spike at exactly 3:42 AM. Thousands of requests. All failing.

But why would DNS suddenly fail?

And then, without thinking, Wolfy threw his head back and let out a long, mournful howl.

"AWOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

The Zoom call went silent.

But Wolfy wasn't listening. He was staring at his terminal. Because his howl had just revealed something.

You see, when Wolfy howls, all the neighborhood dogs start barking. Including his neighbor's dog, Buster. Buster, who was currently sitting on Wolfy's lap (Wolfy was dog-sitting this weekend). Buster, who was now barking loudly into the Zoom call.

"WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF!"

The senior engineers started laughing nervously. "Wolfy, dude, you have a DOG?"

"It's... complicated," Wolfy muttered, muting himself while wrestling Buster away from the mic.

But in that chaos, Wolfy saw it. The ACTUAL problem.

The DNS server had been configured to use an external service that rotated IPs every hour. At 3:42 AM, the IP rotation happened. But the TTL cache in their Kubernetes CoreDNS was set to 24 hours.

Old IP. All services trying to resolve. All services failing. Cascading crash.

"I FOUND IT!" Wolfy unmuted himself. "It's the DNS cache! The external resolver IP changed!"

"Sort of? Look, the howling—I mean, the PATTERN. The cascading failure pattern. It's DNS. I'll fix it now."

4:18 AM - Services recovering. Pods stabilizing. Crisis resolving.

By 4:23 AM, everything was back online. 35 minutes of downtime. $1.75M in lost revenue. But no permanent damage.

The Zoom call was silent for a moment.

Wolfy looked at Buster, who was now peacefully sleeping on his lap. His tail was wagging slightly.

The senior engineers laughed. "Dude, you're wild. In a good way."

If only they knew HOW wild.

4:45 AM - Post-incident wrap-up

As the sun rose at 6:00 AM, Wolfy finally went back to bed. Buster curled up next to him. In the distance, a neighbor's dog howled at the morning.

And Wolfy, unable to resist, howled back softly.

"Awoo."

Somewhere in the Slack channel, a senior engineer posted:

But Wolfy was already asleep, dreaming of DNS records and dog parks.