Remove Web | Application Proxy Server From Cluster

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.

No alerts. No 500 errors. No angry emails from the night shift fraud team. remove web application proxy server from cluster

I waited ten minutes. Then twenty.

Tonight was the night. I had a change ticket: CHG-0421 – Remove wap-03 from cluster and decommission. It was 2:00 AM on a Tuesday