Manufacturing built a territory planner

“We'll migrate it eventually.”— Ravi, Manufacturing

Reason:

Allegedly because the process requires signatures from 2 people. Copied to production via floppy disks.

Built by:

Ravi, a product owner

Build time:

one weekend

Built with:

Excel macros with network access

Database:

Elasticsearch, now also storing the invoices

Authentication:

the firewall is disabled because it blocked something

Deployment:

running with 90% memory usage and "seems fine"

Responsible:

whoever still has the admin password

Documentation:

a photographed whiteboard from a workshop

Security situation:

the database is reachable from the public internet

Future disaster:

It will stop working after someone renames a column.

Age: 160 days · originally expected to last 3 weeks · 2 owners so far · last meaningful change 160 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 91% chance of becoming business critical, 2 accidental connections, 2 departments depend on it.