He cloud computing It has had an abysmal growth in recent years, especially with the arrival of the pandemic and remote work. Thus, more and more companies depend on high availability in the cloud for their operation.
According to Statista, in 2021 the estimated spending on IT services worldwide is $ 1.2 trillion, being the region of America where more is invested in this type of services.
Gartner projections also suggest that spending on cloud services by 2026 will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending.
But investing in cloud servers is not the final step in ensuring more efficient processes. With the adoption of a cloud infrastructure also comes the challenge of maintaining operability, hence the importance of high availability.
What is high availability in the cloud?
Simply put, availability refers to how long a system or component is operational. This is measured in percentages, as an example: if you host an application in the cloud and the server experiences interruptions due to a power failure, the availability would no longer be 100%.
Therefore, the more frequent the outages, the lower the average availability.
Now, do not confuse high availability with uptime. The latter only considers whether a service is accessible or usable.
Instead, availability takes into account the number of connections that a server allows, so it is also a way to measure the capacity of the infrastructure.
Importance of availability in cloud services
Being able to guarantee high levels of availability is important to prevent errors that would affect the user experience or put the security of your applications at risk.
In short, this is what a highly available structure can offer:
- Long periods of operation, which has positive effects on profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction.
- In the event of unexpected events, such as blackouts, negative effects can be minimized to keep company services operational.
- In the face of potential network failures or cyberattacks, high availability in the cloud can help keep confidential information safe.
How do you achieve high availability in the cloud?
The most important thing to obtain high availability is to choose servers in the cloud that can guarantee it.
Companies like Amazon and Microsoft maintain cloud high availability levels of 99% or higher in their services: AWS and Azure, respectively. This is considered excellent performance considering that maintaining a 100% up and running is a complex task.
More than aiming to achieve a system that never fails, when evaluating a service provider it is important that you take into account the factors or technologies that the company offers you to improve availability. For instance:
- Recovery time.
- The number of application servers.
- The load balancers.
- The failover configuration.-
- Scheduled maintenance.
- Monitoring tools.
If your company has special needs that warrant availability levels higher than 99.9%, as occurs in the health and banking sector, there are technical measures that can be taken to optimize the life cycle of your applications, making them more robust and accessible.
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