How to Build and Test High Availability IT Platforms
Cloud computing has taken over the world by storm. Businesses are shifting from local networking and application management techniques to managed cloud systems due to its far-reaching benefits, the biggest advantage being scalability and high availability.
With conventional information system deployment within a local area network or website hosting through servers within a local vicinity, there are situations when there is a dip in performance or the servers become unavailable due to technical or network issues. Such situations are inevitable when you are using locally managed applications and web servers. The best solution to this problem is a high availability configuration or architecture. This blog highlights the importance of high availability platforms and how to build and test such platforms.
What is High Availability?
High availability refers to a system or components of a system that can operate without interruption for longer timeframes. High availability is usually expressed as a percentage, with a 100 percent system indicating that there has been no downtime. However, none of the complex systems used worldwide has ever achieved 100% availability. Even the most reliable services like Google, Microsoft, etc., have a service availability of 99.9%.
Many people use high availability and uptime interchangeably, but they are not the same. Uptime typically refers to the accessibility of the server by any of the services. In contrast, high availability denotes how accessible the service is to each service separately and how many connections a server can allow at a time.
Availability in cloud computing is measured in terms of recovery time, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance of each server, and service performance during unanticipated load times.
Building and Testing High Availability IT Platform
Building a high-availability IT platform doesn’t simply mean adding more components to a system. To build a high availability platform, you need to take certain calculated measures instead of stuffing your system with extra servers. Following are some necessary steps to build a high-availability IT platform:
Use of Multiple Application Servers
Multiple application servers are added to a system to create a cluster of servers. This helps in optimizing the use of resources and minimizing response time. It also helps prevent the system from becoming overburdened during unexpected load times. Multiple application servers facilitate load balancing, which means that none of the application servers inside the cluster takes a major percentage of connection requests.
Another approach to deploying multiple application servers is distributing certain modules over the servers instead of hosting the complete application on all servers. Each server can entertain the threads related to a specific task.
Database Scaling
Databases are run on separate servers than application hosting servers which increases the chance of database crashes. High availability in cloud computing follows a resource redundancy mechanism. This way, database backups are regularly created on multiple servers to avoid failure. Another mechanism of database scaling is sharding which creates a horizontal partition in a database. This means that rows of a table are distributed on separate servers.
Diverse Locations
When scaling up the application and its backend database, the most commonly used and successful technique is diversified geographical location. Mirrors of application and database servers are created in diverse locations.
Testing a High Availability IT Platform
Testing includes several test cases performed on the client-side and server-side applications to measure the percentage of high availability systems. Load management, response time, auto-recovery, and server maintenance are tested separately. Connection requests are bombarded on servers to check the collaborative response of complete systems.
Hire the Best Custom Software Development Companies
Building a high availability system is a complex task. Xpeer helps you deploy such systems by providing information on the top custom software development companies worldwide. We also assist in finding the best web development companies, top software testing companies, and B2B ratings and reviews providers.
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