Category: Scale & Availability

Don’t be fooled into thinking your site is highly available when it isn’t. Planned and regular maintenance involving unavailable applications still counts against availability for those applications. After all, from your customer’s viewpoint, your application is still unavailable. The fact that you planned that it would be unavailable is not important to your customers.</p> I often hear companies using routine maintenance windows as an excuse. Usually, the argument goes like this: ““We have fan…

Your application is large. You have many customers, and they make good use of your many features and capabilities. You have a large catalog of products, and your store is big and feature-rich. You are doing well. Except, you are having problems. Your application crashes too often. Your developers are always on it when it fails, and they are very fast at fixing your site, but it takes time and energy. You are down at least once a month or so—and you can be down for hours at a time. Imagine the…

Consider the following story: ““I went into my CEO’s office. Our CEO is a very driven, technical, hands-on CEO. All technical decisions have to go through him before the company goes forward with a plan. Today, the discussion was about the cloud. The problem? The CEO said we couldn’t move our application to the cloud because it was too expensive. His evidence? ‘If you compare the cost-per-hour of a cloud-based server instance to the monthly costs we pay for our servers, the cloud-based servers…