Best Practices for Creating a High Availability Infrastructure
The concept of High Availability Infrastructure was only confined to the regular business hours at brick and mortar stores prior to the advent of internet, e-commerce, and online services.
Only as long as the doors were open and the lights were on were the services offered. That’s the high availability system of the pre-Internet age.
But the consumer mindset has changed in the digital age.
Users expect that Internet services will be available constantly. Regardless of time zone, business hours, or even holidays, online services are expected to be up and running.
Your IT infrastructure can function normally even if some of its components fail thanks to high availability.
High availability is crucial for mission-critical systems since a service disruption could have a negative impact on the business, leading in extra costs or financial losses.
High availability assures that the IT team has taken all necessary efforts to ensure business continuity, even though it does not completely eliminate the chance of service disruption.
In this article, we will discuss the practices of high availability.
MAINTAIN MULTIPLE DATA CENTERS/CLOUD REGIONS
It’s important to note that you can’t just choose one data center or cloud region. You need multiple locations, depending on your business needs and the applications you are running.
If you’re running a large enterprise application, it may make sense to have multiple data centers in different parts of the world so that if one location experiences a catastrophe (like an earthquake), other sites can continue running without interruption.
A similar approach is taken when choosing what type of infrastructure platform should be used for high availability: by having multiple platforms available at any given time, users will be able to access their applications regardless of what happens elsewhere.
This approach also reduces risk because each platform will be independently managed by IT Services staff who know how best to handle its particular needs—which means there’s less chance of downtime affecting critical systems downstream (e-commerce sites being unable to accept orders).
Continuously monitor your infrastructure
Monitoring your infrastructure is essential to high availability.
The first step toward a successful high availability infrastructure is monitoring, which should be continuous and automated.
Monitoring should also include other aspects of how your application runs: what results do we get from our tests? Are they consistent with what we expect? How often do we fail at certain parts of our codebase (and why)?
These questions help us understand how well our tests are working as part of an overall picture of whether or not our system is working properly
Manage Your Uptime with an SLA
An SLA is a contract between you and your IT service provider that defines how long they will be available to respond to requests, including the ability to restore services after an outage.
The language of an SLA should be clear and concise; it should include the specific types of services being provided, how long each type can be down for (e.g., one hour), what happens if something goes wrong with that service during its downtime window (e.g., no one will be able to access mail), and so on.
Validate Your Backups with Quick Recovery and Disaster Recovery Testing
If you want to be sure that your backups and restore processes are working as expected, it’s important to test them regularly.
- Test your backup processes frequently with a “rapid recovery” or “disaster recovery” test plan.
This can be done by simulating an outage and testing whether or not the backup process can recover data in a timely manner. For example, if you have a daily offsite backup of all customer data (such as during business hours), then ensure that this is done every day at noon—even if there was no scheduled outage during those hours on another server where customer data was stored in separate locations than where they were normally stored between midnight and noon each night.
- Test your restore processes often using live servers so that any problems can be identified quickly before they affect other parts of the infrastructure.
Control Your Disaster Recovery Costs
It’s important to budget for disaster recovery costs.
Too often, organizations underestimate how much they will need to spend on DR infrastructure, and then find themselves in a financial bind when something goes wrong.
It’s also true that you can control the cost of DR by using cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
These providers offer tools that allow you to create private clouds with preconfigured configurations so your organization doesn’t have to worry about managing its own servers—it just needs access to those resources through their public cloud platforms!
In addition, these platforms provide access not just for single users but also for large organizations who want scale at an affordable rate without having their own servers set up at all; this means less overhead from hardware purchases as well as labor costs associated with maintaining them yourself over time.
The Conclusion
It’s important to remember that high availability infrastructure is not a “set it and forget it” solution.
With high availability infrastructure in place, you can avoid most downtime and continue to run business-critical applications, even when there are problems elsewhere.