Every Solution Should Be A High-Availability Solution
We take a lot of software jobs where some critical part of the infrastructure wasn’t developed in a way to support continuous operation. Someone or organization planned, built and tested a pretty great piece of software. This software undoubtedly was created with love and followed every part of the stakeholders’ requirements. Unfortunately, more often then not there wasn’t any planning into how to keep the software up and running in case of outages, failures, server restarts or some bug you could never have thought of.
The title of this post mentions critical apps, anything someone pays us money to build is critical to us and to them, especially. It doesn’t matter if this is an Organ Transplant Search or online magazine – every app is critical to someone. Part of consulting is developing software that adds value to the business, most companies are really good at this part. The part that often gets over looked is the continuous operation of those critical applications. It’s important to develop software and build things so that they can run without you having to worry if they’re going to crash or fail.
Maintaining continuous operation of apps is a critical technical requirement as well as a business one. For example, we recently developed a system that integrates with the FAA SWIM data stream. The data stream can only be consumed via a single Java JMS console application. This application consumes thousands of transactions per second and needs to run full time from server. If the system reboots—planned or unplanned—that can pose a significant threat to operational continuity and data integrity. When planning this application’s infrastructure, understanding just how to mitigate these risks is crucial. Then implementing a strategy to automatically restart the applications post-reboot, or some other type of failure without the need for manual intervention, is a key step in ensuring high availability and reliability of your business services.
Ensuring Business Continuity and Operational Efficiency
For organizations, the ability to maintain uninterrupted operation of key applications is a cornerstone of operational efficiency and business continuity. By setting up applications to automatically restart after a server reboot, handle invalid data, nulls, or handle application failures organizations can significantly mitigate the risk of data loss and service downtime. This approach is particularly vital for applications that are integral to business operations or data processing. The implementation of such a solution is a testament to an organization’s commitment to operational resilience and reliability, key factors that underpin the trust of customers and stakeholders in today’s competitive business environment.
When developing software or even a new website for a client, don’t forget to create an architecture that supports an uninterrupted operation. By configuring sidecar services such as proper error logging, reporting, system outage alerts you can ensure that your systems are robust enough to handle an issues that might be thrown at you.