High Availability: Concepts, Best Practices & Benefits

Software products rolled out in the market achieve success only when their orientation, optimization, and architecture design meet customer goals and objectives. Generally, most businesses fail right after live events correlating to degraded performance, slow speed, and low availability to end-users. In this blog, we will help solution architects understand and articulate the foundation and design architecture to make it stable but also highly available, panning out a high class of reliability, stability, and availability in business. The details covered in this blog will also enable product designers to understand and keep an open thought to achieve Five nines HA and accept methods to integrate the system components.

The Need for High Availability

We constantly come across the news of new startups and often big companies failing because of their unavailability to handle the load.

High availability is the entire product trait referring to related systems and services designed to avoid any downtime. To keep systems with 99.999% of availability to customers, all systems components must behave in sync without any point of failure.

The major requirements concerning infrastructure are hardware redundancy, software redundancy, data replication, and preventing the points of failure.

Developers and solution architects are required to develop applications highly available with utmost care to handle availability 24*7/24*5 as per the business demand to accomplish real-time customer goals.

However, companies still face the prime challenge of keeping applications that exist and accessible in the broad range of different user load growth by missing the major contributors to high availability

For example, when an application is developed without keeping user and data growth upfront, it will fail to deliver consistent SLAs and fails beyond the time when there is an apparent surge deviation on several users putting a load on systems.

To ensure maximum uptime, there are certain industry standards and best practices. Read on to find out.

Three Nines and Five Nines Uptime

Three or five nines is the industry standard measure of uptime. This measurement could be related to the entire architecture system itself, the system processes within a framework, or the program operating inside an infrastructure. This approximation is frequently related to the product/program being delivered to clients in the form of a website or web application. The table below defines downtime related to the percentage of “Nines”.

How to Achieve High Availability With Maximum Uptime for Apps?

Best Practices to Attain High Availability

The prime goal of high availability products/systems is to prevent and eliminate single points of failure. Accomplishing these goals means putting in place multiple action plans that have been tested and are ready to respond independently and immediately to all service disturbances, disruptions, and failures including hardware, software, and application irregularities.

Few points to give heed whilst designing the architecture:

• The annihilation of downtime can be accomplished with the composed, advanced, skilled planning and implementation of the system as per the business needs
• Architects with critical envision are required to and prepare for any occurrence or disaster, which could obstruct the prime objective of the expected uptime goal
• A well-designed high availability application system will attain 99% of results orientation of HA through proper planning and designing
• Orchestrate the quick recovery when any failure joint occurs throughout the operation of system components and individual modules
• Work through continuous monitoring process to expose bottleneck areas and tune the system components

Benefits of High Availability

With the emerging need for high availability technology systems these days, companies are looking for a one-stop solution for cost-effectiveness, better performance, better customer experience, easily maintainable, high-performing infrastructure, and optimization.

Xoriant helps customers by understanding their precise requirements and converting them into real-time goals. We utilize cloud or on-premises resources to meet the end goal. The benefits include adding more business demand, data growth, user growth and optimized performance output from the product.

To learn more about High Availability, connect with Xoriant Experts.