Articles : High Availability

As much as technology is improving to enable companies to pursue high availability and cater for disaster mitigation, the reality is that even with the best-made plans, disasters are likely to happen. Servers will fail, the software may run into issues that cause failure, and security incidents are likely to occur that need to be handled. Even with redundancy and distributed networks in place, systems are not immune from failure – even if the likelihood and impact are greatly reduced. 

Websites and applications should be designed to be functional, high-performance, and resilient to common and uncommon disasters. Despite your best plans, it’s inevitable that events will conspire to interrupt the smooth operation of your systems. For businesses that depend on software and web services, disasters can have a massive financial impact, making it critical for IT teams to do everything possible to avoid or mitigate them. The way your applications respond to disaster incidents is a good indication of the overall quality of your architecture and code. Today, we will share some tips that should help you and your team build an application infrastructure that is resilient against even the worst disasters.

Tech innovator Snapt helps retailers stay online during the most important sales day of the year by ensuring that websites, applications, and services remain online, secure, and function as fast as possible. San Francisco, Cal. — With the most significant sales of the year happening right after Thanksgiving, Black Friday is the most critical day in the holiday shopping season for retailers. As retail businesses increasingly move focus to online sales, all parts of the sales process must function correctly during the year's biggest sales event—including online offerings. However, Black Fridays past have seen even large retailers like Costco, J.Crew, Walmart, and Lululemon experience issues with their online retail websites, unprepared to meet the surge of online traffic.

What's the most shocking thing about Facebook Group's outage, which took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline on October 4, 2021? The millions of missed messages? That it took around seven hours to identify and resolve the problem? The estimated $50 billion wiped off Facebook's value? No, the most shocking thing is that it took until now for this to happen.

On Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 at 09:47 UTC, Fastly's Content Delivery Network (CDN) went down. Sites affected included Reddit, eBay, Twitch, GOV.UK, Pinterest, and Vimeo. Some were affected in smaller ways - Twitter emojis were no longer visible, for example.

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at designing for resilience using a Cloud-N disaster recovery and mitigation strategy.

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at designing distributed systems for digital healthcare.

Picture this: you have just completed a brand new installation of a server (Windows Server, Ubuntu, etc.) where you are going to deploy your organization's web portal. You need to ensure this service stays online and protected from bad actors.

If you're considering whether you can afford running more than one server for your business, you're likely to discover that you can't afford not to. Even with the additional operational expenses, you’ll be better off having redundant servers because redundancy minimizes downtime for your critical applications and reduces the costs incurred by outages, which can be huge. The price of downtime is always too high for any business. Like it or not, IT downtime is a fact of life. Systems fail. Outages happen. The failure rate of cloud servers is roughly 2% annually, for example. The larger the installation, the more frequently outages will occur. The best way to deal with these inevitable worst-case scenarios is to be prepared and minimize the downtime as much as possible.