High Availability Explained
By
Reyaz Shaik
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High Availability is in the Eye of
the beholder
•CEO: we don't loose sales
•Sales: we can extend our offer basing on HA level
•Accounts managers: we don't upset our customers
(that often)
•Developers: we can be proud – our services are
working ;)
• System engineers: we can sleep well (and fsck, we
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So How many
9's?
Monthly: 1 hour of outage means 100% - 0.13888 ~= 99.86112 of availability
Yearly: 1 hour of outage means 100% - 0.01142 ~= 99.98858 of availability
Availability Downtime (year) Downtime (month)
90% (“one nine”) 36.5 days 72 hours
95% 18.25 days 36 hours
97% 10.96 days 21.6 hours
98% 7.30 days 14.4 hours
99% (“two nines”) 3.65 days 7.2 hours
99.5% 1.83 days 3.6 hours
99.8% 17.52 hours 86.23 minutes
99.9% (“three nines”) 4.38 hours 21.56 minutes
99.99 (“four nines”) 52.56 minutes 4.32 minutes
99.999 (“five nines”) 5.26 minutes 25.9 seconds
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High Availability
• In computing, the term availability is used to describe the period of time
when a service is available, as well as the time required by a system to
respond to a request made by a user.
• In information technology, high availability refers to a system or
component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of
time. Availability can be measured relative to "100% operational" or
"never failing."
Fault Tolerance
• A good way to think of it is that you have two separate machines
that are mirrored. In the event that the main system has a
hardware failure, the secondary system takes over and there is
zero downtime.
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How High Availability Works?
To create a highly available system, three characteristics
should be present:
• Redundancy
• Monitoring
• Failover
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How High Availability Works?
• Redundancy
In computing, redundancy means that there are multiple components that can
perform the same task. This eliminates the single point of failure problem by allowing
a second server to take over a task if the first one goes down or becomes disabled.
• Monitoring
In a highly available setup, the system needs to be able to monitor itself for failure.
This means that there are regular checks to ensure that all components are working
properly
• Failover
Failover is the process by which one node takes over the job of another in the event
that one becomes disabled. This comes as a result of monitoring for failures by the
system..
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Load-balancing
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Failover:
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HA vs FT
Windows Server Fault Tolerant
Failover Clustering(HA) Solution
Hardware Failure P P
OS Level Failure P
Application Failure P
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HA Example
Without beating around the bush let me elaborate
this more.
•lb1 & lb2 are load balancers for the application
servers. All together we call them application load
balancing cluster.
•app1 & app2 are application servers. All together
we call them application cluster.
•lb3 & lb4 are load balancers for the
database servers. All together we call them
database load balancing cluster.
•Then we have the database cluster at the end that
are db1 and db2. All together we call them
database cluster.
•Active means particular component is accepting
requests and passive means particular component
is not accepting requests but when the active
component is down passive component will take
over and will start accepting requests.
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HA Example On a happy day user will make a request.
• The request will be accepted by lb1 and
depending on the load balancing algorithm in
lb1 request will be passed to the app1 or app2.
• From there the request will be handed over to
the lb3 by app1 or app2. lb3 will communicate
with the database.
• The response will follow the same path as the
request’s path.
Okay now let’s get ready for some action because
you can’t expect a happy day everyday.
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What if the lb1 is down
Here even though lb1 is down lb2 has taken over
and now lb2 is in active status.
System is functional even though one load
balancer has failed.
Best part is here users will not experience any
downtime of the system due to the failure of lb1.
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Let’s assume app1 is down
Now you can see even though one application
sever went unavailable system is functional
without an issue.
Just like the previous example.
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Now let’s take the worst case scenario
where 4 components are down
Oh! Nooohhhh!!!
Here a single component is unavailable from each
cluster that means four components are not
unavailable altogether.
Will the application be able to function as on a
happy day? Yes, a big yes.
You can image the power of having high
availability in your application. Even though a
single component or multiple components are
unavailable your application will be available for
it’s intended parties without an issue. Perfect
right!!!.
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