High Availability has become a crucial element for businesses that want to stay competitive and keep their systems and operations running smoothly. Think of it as the backbone of modern infrastructure, ensuring your platform remains not just up and running, but stable and reliable, even during traffic spikes or unexpected hardware failures.
Businesses moving to the Cloud quickly realise that uptime is one of the most crucial factors of success. With advanced high availability solutions, companies can implement robust, fail-safes to ensure their systems are always available, even in times of crisis. Whether adopting a Well-Architected Framework or integrating DevOps, understanding and implementing High Availability solutions is a first step towards building a resilient platform.
At the core of High Availability lies redundancy. By deploying multiple systems that perform the same function, you eliminate the risk of a Single Point of Failure (SPOF), which could otherwise bring your entire platform to a halt.
The Building Blocks of a Resilient VPC
To ensure your platform’s uptime, you need to go beyond just a simple backup strategy. Businesses must implement resilient infrastructure that mitigates the risk across multiple components. Here’s a breakdown of how to build resilience into your technology stack:
1. Redundant Servers for Reliability
Consider this: to maintain uptime, businesses should run multiple web servers hosting the same applications and content. This ensures, if one server becomes unavailable, the other server seamlessly takes over, keeping the business operational. However, redundancy shouldn’t be limited to just the web server level—it should be applied across every layer of your platform.
Why it matters:
When you apply redundancy across all layers—whether it’s web servers, databases, or even your network—you significantly reduce the risk of unplanned downtime. Each layer should be supported by at least one other active server, which means you’ve always got a solution ready in the event of failure.
2. Load Balancing: Smart Traffic Distribution
One of the simplest yet most effective ways to ensure high availability is Load Balancing. This solution distributes incoming web traffic across multiple servers, ensuring that no single server is overloaded.
In a Resilient VPC setup, load balancing prevents any server from becoming a bottleneck. Even if one of your servers is underperforming or experiencing downtime, traffic is automatically rerouted to the remaining healthy servers. The result? No interruptions in service for your customers, regardless of any challenges.
Why it matters:
Load balancing is a simple yet powerful way to keep your platform up and running. It also provides the flexibility to scale your infrastructure as your business grows, ensuring consistent performance.
3. Database Clustering: Never Lose Data
Having multiple database servers in place is another vital layer of resilience. With database clustering, two servers host the same database, with one server acting as a backup. If one server fails, the other takes over the workload instantly. This ensures that even if there’s an unexpected database outage, your business remains operational without losing data or experiencing downtime.
Why it matters:
Ensuring that your database is resilient can mean the difference between a smooth recovery from failure and catastrophic data loss. Clustering safeguards your critical data, keeping your platform in sync and your business running without interruptions.
The Complexity of Achieving High Availability
Achieving true High Availability isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it scenario. It involves addressing several challenges and complexities to ensure that your infrastructure is not only robust but also intelligently designed to respond to failures. For instance, configuring the right traffic routing during an outage requires advanced strategies, including automated failover processes.
While these complexities may seem overwhelming at first, with the right support and guidance from ANS, businesses can successfully implement High Availability solutions tailored to their unique business needs.
ANS’s VPC Platform: Empowering Your Business Evolution
At ANS, we understand the importance of uptime for businesses. That’s why our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) platform is equipped with cutting-edge bolt-on technologies that make implementing a High Availability solution easier than ever. By leveraging Load Balancing and Database Clustering, we ensure your platform is both resilient and scalable, giving you peace of mind knowing that your business is protected.
We know that this evolution can seem complex, but don’t worry—ANS is here to guide you through the process. With our free Pre-Sales-led assessment, you’ll get expert advice on how your platform performs today and what’s possible for the future. Our team will walk you through each step to achieve High Availability, help you understand the associated costs, and ultimately ensure that your business is prepared for the next level of resilience. ANS provides expert technical guidance to assess your current platform and business needs, then design a future-proof solution. Our free VPC assessment offers a comprehensive view of the best technical solution through tailored workshops.
How to Get Started?
If you’re ready to take the first step toward building a more resilient platform and improve your uptime, we’re here to help. Get in touch with your Account Manager or Book a call.