Ski trip gone wrong in my mother’s Mercedes made me think of the cloud

(Not me or my car in the photo. Should've taken one but I was panicking. Everyone was fine.)

Here’s how it went…

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting my parents in LA for Christmas. They live a couple hours away from Big Bear Mountain. My son and I both love skiing and we had never been to Big Bear, so we planned a trip. Bought lift tickets online and took care of rental, so that we can be on the lifts faster. 

It had been snowing. The road conditions called for 4WD/AWD or with chains. My rental was a 2WD and I didn’t want to mess with chains — never done them before. So I took my mother’s Mercedes SUV. 

“The ‘top off coolant’ message just came on yesterday”. My mother told me. “Do we need take it to the mechanic first? We just had it serviced”. 

“Probably no big deal if it was recently serviced. May be just a little low and we can add more coolant when we get back.” I told her. My wife had been driving Mercedes for years. We had a similar model a few years back and I was pretty familiar with their indicators and messages.

Or so I thought. 

40 minutes into the trip, the car started beeping frantically, the dashboard turned red with a red message yelling at me: “Stop! Shut engine off!”. I had never seen the dashboard be so angry! I found the nearest highway exit and pulled over.  

The engine must overheated, but how could this happen?! Should’ve bought insurance on those non-refundable lift tickets… I’m gonna get stranded in the mountains with my wife and kid… I was trying to stay calm with so many thoughts flowing through my head all of a sudden.

Luckily, I was able to find an Auto Zone just a couple of miles away. Thank God for technology! Getting there might be a challenge. I waited a bit longer for the engine to cool down. I was going between gentle touches of the accelerator and switching immediately to neutral to try to let momentum get us there at an average of 20mph. Finally made it without blowing up the engine. That was the longest 2 mile drive of my life. Piece of sh*t Mercedes…

I explained the situation to the shop manager and he came out with some coolant. Apparently there was almost none left — as far as we could see from the reservoir. The culprit? Wasn’t a leak, wasn’t any mechanical problem, it was the coolant reservoir cap that wasn’t tightened. The coolant spilled over under engine pressure. Yep, that was it. I guess it wasn’t the car’s fault.

Whew! Back on the way. May still get half day of skiing in, if nothing else happens. 

Roads started to incline a bit as we approach the mountains. The car was now struggling to climb beyond 60mph, even started to slow down on the inclines, while this was still on the highway and the speed limit was 70. I had to manually downshift to lower gears to keep it going. 

We finally made it just past lunch time. Hit the slopes and had 4 or 5 runs. It was short but still fun. The rest of the trip wasn’t as eventful and we returned home safe but exhausted. 

Piece of sh*t Mercedes. I’m trading mine in as soon as I return home. I was thinking the entire drive. 

The next day, my parents took it to the mechanic. It turned out part of the floor mat went too far up and was stuck behind the gas pedal. Again, I guess it wasn’t the car’s fault. 

What does this have to do with Cloud? Well, doesn’t that remind you how the CSP was usually blamed when a compromised occurred in a cloud environment? When was the last time you cursed at AWS when something in your AWS account didn’t work? 

Don’t forget, how you configure and use the Cloud is equally, if not more, important for the security and well being of your environment, as it is the underlying infrastructure itself. It is often these “low tech” issues and simple misconfigurations that get us in trouble. 

The monitoring and warning from the Mercedes SUV really saved us. It could’ve been so much worse. 

Luckily we have JupiterOne. What's monitoring your Cloud?