High Availability Best Practices | Engine Yard Blog

High Availability Best Practices

Let’s face it: outages are a pain. They’re also unavoidable. Whether your application is in the cloud or on physical hardware, it’s bound to encounter failures eventually. To help mitigate these failures, we recommend using a High Availability (HA) configuration for mission-critical applications. While requirements and types of High Availability setups vary widely, here are some best practices through the lens of applications deployed in the cloud. Background Before we begin, let’s discuss what High Availability actually means. For our purposes, HA means that your application is configured to handle different types of failures with minimal to zero downtime. Components of an HA setup can include servers in different geographic locations, database redundancy and data replication. We will discuss these, and more, later. Why bother? From a technology perspective, it’s easy to ...

Full article: https://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/high-availability-be...