High availability is essential to any successful cloud infrastructure because it ensures that a system is always available, meeting requirements and providing the best user experience possible. In this article, I'll show you three critical aspects that cloud architects should consider when designing highly available cloud infrastructure:
redundancy and scalability,
monitoring and maintenance,
and disaster recovery/business continuity.
Scalability and redundancy
When designing highly available cloud infrastructure, It's important to consider redundancy and scalability.
The ability of a system to continue functioning even if one or more of its components fail is referred to as redundancy. This can be accomplished through data redundancy, in which multiple copies of data are stored in different locations, or network redundancy, in which multiple paths for data to travel through are available.
Scalability, on the other hand, means a system's ability to handle an increased load without affecting performance. Your infrastructure can accomplish this through vertical scalability, which adds resources to a single system, or horizontal scalability, which involves adding new systems to the infrastructure.
Monitoring and maintenance
Monitoring and maintenance policies allow you to know when there is an issue and how to handle it.
Monitoring regularly checks a system's status, including its performance and resource usage. Cloud engineers can accomplish this through system monitoring, which examines the underlying infrastructure, and application monitoring, which analyzes the applications running on the system.
On the other hand, maintenance is checking and updating the system regularly to ensure it is running smoothly. You can accomplish maintenance through preventative maintenance, which includes checking and updating the system before any issues arise, or reactive maintenance, which involves checking and updating the system after an issue has been detected.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Disaster recovery and business continuity handle what happens if your infrastructure is down.
Quickly restoring a system to a working state after a disaster, such as a power outage or natural disaster, is known as disaster recovery. This can be accomplished through backup and restore. Common practices are backing up the system and restoring it after a disaster, or replication, which involves replicating the system in real time to a secondary location.
On the other hand, business continuity ensures that the system can continue operating in the event of a disaster. You can accomplish this through failover, switching the system to a secondary location after a disaster, or failback, returning the system to its primary location after the disaster has been resolved.
High availability is a critical component of any successful cloud infrastructure. By understanding and implementing these three aspects, cloud architects can ensure that their infrastructure is always available, meets requirements, and provides the best user experience.
It is critical to remember that these aspects are interconnected, and a good balance between them will result in an overall highly available system.
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