High Availability: What You Need To Know
Businesses create quality content and maintain a digital presence with the intent of attracting potential conversion traffic. At the same time, customers expect nothing less than immediate available information and services whenever they interact with their preferred brands online. Now, if you have been managing your company’s website or application for some time, you would be aware of the impact that uptime delays or failures can have on your bottom line. Using high availability solutions is an excellent way to mitigate this potential risk and set up a fail-safe system for your digital assets.
So, what exactly is high availability, and how can they be created? That’s what we will discuss in this article. Let’s begin.
Understanding high availability
High availability makes the content on an application or website accessible for maximum potential uptime. The availability of a system essentially determines the extent to it is online and accessible to users. While theoretically, it should be 100% all the time, realistically, system availability depends on various contributing factors and is never really 100%. However, systems designed with high availability solutions come close through progressively increasing fault tolerance.
How high availability works
A high availability system must have redundancy of data, constant monitoring of system process, and built-in failover function. This way, whenever there is a delay or deactivation within the system, the users don’t have to suffer downtime. Instead, the system switches gears automatically and continues functioning. In order to build such a high availability system, some key components are required. These are: Networked file system
For high accessibility and failure tolerance, all data has to be redundant and replicated. That is possible through a networked file system, wherein files are stored with a distributed replicated volume. A shared file system is created across all servers, and data is replicated in real-time. Database management system the database in a high availability system is also managed in the form of clusters. Your content and user information are stored in a primary database and replicated in support databases simultaneously. All database nodes within the system are matching at any given time, and any of the nodes can handle user queries.
Web servers
Web servers act as intermediaries that process user requests and fulfill them by reading content from the database or writing it on the database. The required software and plugins to run your application or website smoothly are stored on the webserver. In a high availability system, multiple servers remain active simultaneously and can access and update the replicated file system at any given time.
Load balancer
The incoming web traffic load must be assigned, prioritized, and distributed amongst different servers, part of the high availability system. This task is handled by a load balancer that offers a single access point to user traffic without resulting in a single point of failure.
Failover process
A high availability system is continuously monitored to detect failures and switch to a different node when one is deactivated. A virtual router redundancy protocol with a failover IP address manages this transition. A failure threshold is determined, and when it’s crossed, user requests are assigned to a new node while the failed node is fixed
Evaluating your system’s need for high availability
Despite the enhanced functionality, data security, and positive user experience offered by high availability systems, their adoption is cost and time intensive. Thus, before going in this direction, you should evaluate your system’s current availability and the prospect of setting up a high availability architecture. For high availability implementation, assess your infrastructure on the following criteria:
1. Database and network size.
2. Scope of functionality.
3. Existing hardware components.
4. Future demand and scale-up.
5. User traffic.
6. Current downtime (annual).
If your infrastructure is large enough to handle high user traffic and still experiences regular downtimes, then there may be system inefficiencies that can be fixed through high availability.
With the help of add-on servers, supplemental hardware components, and software utilities, you can systematically start building a high availability system. In conclusion, whether your website or application needs high availability solutions depends on your user traffic, nature of data transactions, and failure tolerance. Having an in-depth understanding of high-availability solutions and what they can do for your existing system can help you make an informed decision.
With E2E Cloud, you can explore the feasibility and the incredible benefits of high-availability solutions for your website or application. Experience a fail-safe, multi-component architecture to improve your uptime and reduce system redundancy and failure with E2E Cloud.
