There is a new growing measurement for “Uptime” as systems become distributed. We used to be proud of the fact that our server had not been cycled (re-booted) for a long period of time. Servers staying up months or years provided bragging rights to individuals managing them. Today that is becoming less the case. The more important measurement is the shortness of service interruptions.
With services such as SQL Server there are several technologies reducing outage time for any reason. With Always On implementations those disruptions can be virtually zero. There is obviously a cost increase as downtime decreases. And for SQL Server that price differential can be surprisingly expensive.
Using Cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS) and you have a completely different cost/performance/reliability structure. Your measurement of available service is generally very high with a greatly reduced cost compared to self-hosted systems. The problem you have in this case is that when there are outages, and they do occur, restoration of the service tends to be higher than other options.
Enter the hybrid solution with Cloud based and self-managed resources. This Hybrid solution provides the best of both worlds of low cost tenant based hosting aligned with self-hosted high performance solutions. This increases your complexity, but reduces your risk of complete down time when your Cloud provider runs into a glitch.
The highest uptime seems to come from services that are distributed by design in co-located implementations. Replicated data and distributed computing keep both data persistence and application processing up and running at commodity hardware costs.
At the end of the day, it is the Service Agreements you must fulfill driving much of your decision for how to keep your services active, defining what your bragging rights must be. Stating the obvious, it does little good to say your server has been up for over a year when the service it hosts is not available as agreed. It’s no longer about individual machines…it’s all about availability.
Do you have bragging rights? How do you increase the availability of your services? Enter the conversation here or drop an email btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben