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How To Choose A Cloud When You Need High Availability

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How to Choose a Cloud when you need High Availability

How To Choose A Cloud When You Need High Availability

Understand the cloud market

A number of analyst firms are predicting an ever-increasing number of deployments of applications, databases, and solutions in the cloud. According to Gartner, firms are “moving to the cloud at an increasing rate.”[1] In fact, Gartner and other analysts expect the pace of cloud migration and deployment will continue to accelerate, driven in large part by the pace of innovation in the cloud. In a TechTarget article by Kurt Marko, of MarkoInsights, Marko notes that the pace of innovation that is “being undertaken in the cloud likely can’t be replicated on premises due to the elastic, scalable, and on-demand nature of managed public cloud services.”

We see more and more companies that had been using the cloud only for DevOps applications and databases that were not essential to their business, are now moving mission-critical applications, ERPs and databases that require high availability protection to the cloud.

If you are considering a move to the cloud – and it seems likely that you are – there are several keys to understand when you need high availability.

Familiarize yourself with the cloud high availability options

To plan for the proper availability solution for a cloud or hybrid cloud deployment, consider what the pain points are with regards to both availability (99.9% uptime) and high availability (99.99% uptime). You also need to understand the options that are available for high availability with an eye towards your plans to migrate to the cloud. Notable analysts and experts suggest looking for solutions that will not only mitigate and reduce the pain of migrating your workloads, but will also provide a balanced and comprehensive approach to availability throughout the lifespan of your cloud architecture. Note, it is also wise to consider solutions that can provide protection and high availability for portions of your workload that may one day repatriate from the cloud back to your on-premises environment.

Here are ten things to consider when comparing your availability options in the cloud: 

1. The deployment method. Is it possible to deploy the availability solution you are considering  using an image, CLI, UI, or other repeatable solution such as cloud formation template or packaged scripts.

2. The system requirements. Most notably, consider the operating system (OS), disk, CPU, and memory requirements.

3. The deployment environments. Do your availability options support on-premises only, one or more public clouds, or can they support a mixture, and/or hybrid cloud deployment. Is there a SaaS offering available as well?

4. The breadth and depth of application protection. “Breadth” meaning what types of applications, databases, front-ends, networking, and infrastructure components can be protected?  Is there a flexible framework for adding new applications and variants? “Depth” meaning – is the solution application-aware – and able to maintain application-specific best practices throughout the application failover/failback processes?

5. Performance requirements. We often think of RTO and RPO, but what about other performance needs of your solution. Will your availability solution cause performance issues on failover?

6. Resilience requirements. How large a cluster can the availability solution support?, How many faults and failures can it detect and recover from. How will replication be handled while keeping metadata in sync?

7. Supportability and maintenance. Does the availability vendor have experience with a wide range of availability needs and configurations? Do they have longevity, and a support system designed to address issues that may go beyond their solution? Can they help you minimize disruption and planned downtime during your system management and maintenance (patches, upgrades, and general maintenance).

8. Total cost of ownership. There are entire industries and services dedicated to helping you calculate the total cost of ownership, so we won’t cover that here. Suffice it to say, your calculations will be unique to your organization, cloud provider, applications, and IT team. You should consider whether your availability solution vendor can help you identify strategies for saving utilization, licensing, and other costs? Does the solution automate manual tasks, reduce IT labor time?

9. Licensing and pricing model. How do you consume the cost of the software? Is there a subscription fee, subscription model, pay-as-you-go offering, bring your own license (BYOL), or combination of flexible options. How will you enable the product licensing?  Is there a license server, licensing service, or encrypted key based on virtual machine deployment details, such as address, hostname, MAC address.

10. The impact on IT staff. How much training with the solution require? How much manual intervention will be needed in the event of an application failure event or disaster? Will it require specialized scripting that needs to be maintained? Who will be responsible for ongoing maintenance?

Weigh the benefits and trade-offs

Like every important decision, you need to understand your tradeoffs and choose the best balance to meet your needs. For example, I recently asked a friend to recommend a good walking shoe. I bought a pair he raved about – noting how lightweight they were, how strong and durable the fabric, and how stylish they were.  I went for my first long walk-run in them, and I donated my first pair of “one run” shoes immediately thereafter. When I went to ‘Fleet Feet’ to get an expert’s opinion I ended up with a heavier shoe, with more breathable fabric (also less durable), and an unrivaled level of hideousness. I made a tradeoff between appearance and function that worked for my needs and budget.

Like running shoes, there is no silver bullet solution that will be the right fit for every company, every application, every database, and every possible server and architecture. You are officially free to stop looking for it. Instead, settle into the activity of weighing the trade-offs to determine what is the right fit for your company’s needs. Think about your tradeoffs. For example, if you’re sure you will be a full Microsoft shop, the importance of GCP and AWS support should be a little lower in your evaluation process.

Take your IT infrastructure dynamics into account

Think holistically about availability in your entire IT infrastructure – both on premises and in the cloud. The reasons to do so are best explained with another analogy. In 2018, I was the coordinator for an outreach program feeding the homeless and hungry in Columbia, South Carolina. Our group met once a week to serve a meal and a message of hope to over 100 men, women and children. When we considered expanding – adding more days of the week, more hours, or additional services, we had to think well beyond simple scheduling requirements. Knowing that we were providing a critical service to clients who depend on us, we had to consider all the factors that affected our ability to deliver those services consistently for the long-term, such as: cost, ages of our team members, outside obligations, alternative methods to achieve our goals, risk factors, and other dynamics within our parent organization.

When you are choosing your solution, after you’ve understood the market, familiarized yourself with options, and weighed the trade-offs, the last step is to take into account the various other dynamics in your overall environment. Will the solution meet the needs of your business as a whole? Will your critical data be protected from loss? Will your end-user productivity be protected from downtime? What training will be required to move to the cloud and how will that impact your ability to manage or maintain the solution that you choose? What IT roles will be added, removed, or changed in your cloud journey?  Will any responsibilities for application availability move to any line-of-business owners? And how will the shifts in responsibilities, or team make up improve or decrease your overall potential for success. Consider whether your team needs to take a step-by-step approach, migrating smaller workloads first.

As VP of Customer Experience, I have seen a wide range of cloud migrating planning – some straightforward others extremely disruptive. In one instance a customers’ move to the cloud was highly contentious because management saw it as an opportunity to eliminate an entire IT department. I’m not suggesting that you play politics, but you should be aware of all of the factors at play in these complex projects.

Migrating to the cloud is supposed to save money, time and resources while affording improvements in availability and resilience. Regardless of which cloud you choose, make sure that you consider these tips and select the corresponding availability solution that gives you the flexibility to deliver the protection you need in the configuration you want.

Learn more about cloud high availability options with SIOS.

– Cassius Rhue, VP of Customer Experience, SIOS

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Six Reasons Your Cloud Migration Has Stalled

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Six Reasons Your Cloud Migration Has Stalled

More and more customers are seeking to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability and performance of the cloud. As the number of applications, solutions, customers, and partners making the shift increases, be sure that your migration doesn’t stall.

Avoid the Following Six Reasons Cloud Migrations Stall

1. Incomplete cloud migration project plans

Project planning is widely thought to be a key contributor to project success. The planning plays an essential role in helping guide stakeholders, diverse implementation teams, and partners through the project phases. Planning helps identify desired goals, align resources and teams to those goals, reduce risks, avoid missed deadlines, and ultimately deliver a highly available solution in the cloud.  Incomplete plans and incomplete planning are often a big cause of stalled projects.  At the ninth hour a key dependency is identified. During an unexpected server reboot an application monitoring and HA hole is identified (see below). Be sure that your cloud migration has a plan, and work the plan.

2. Over-engineering on-premises

“This is how we did it on our on-premises nodes,” was the phrase that started a recent customer conversation. The customer engaged with Edmond Melkomian, Project Manager for SIOS Professional Services, when their attempts to migrate to the cloud stalled.  During a discovery session, Edmond was able to uncover a number of over-engineered items related to on-premises versus cloud architecture. For some projects, reproducing what was done on premises can be a resume for bloat, complexity, and delays. Analyze your architecture and migration plans and ruthlessly eliminate over-engineered components and designs, especially with networking and storage.

3. Under-provisioning

Controlling cost and preventing sprawl are an important and critical aspect of cloud migrations.  However, some customers, anxious about per hour charges and associated costs for disks and bandwidth fall into the trap of under-provisioning.  In this trap, resources are improperly sized, be that disks that have the wrong speed characteristics, compute resources with the wrong CPU or memory footprint, or clusters with the wrong number of nodes.  In such under-provisioned cases, issues arise when User Acceptance Test (UAT) begins and expected/anticipated workloads create a log jam on undersized resources.  Or a cost optimization of a target node is unable to properly handle resources in a failover scenario. While resizing virtual machines in the cloud is a simple process, these sizing issues often create delays while architects and Chief Financial Officers try to understand the impact of re-provisioning resources.

4. Internal IT processes

Every great enterprise company has a set of internal processes, and chances are your team and company are no exception.  IT processes are usually key among the processes that can have a large impact on the success of your cloud migration strategy. In the past, many companies had long requisition and acquisition processes, including bids, sizing guides, order approvals, server prep and configuration, and final deployment.  The cloud process has dramatically altered the way compute, storage, and network resources, among others, are acquired and deployed.  However, if your processes haven’t kept up with the speed of the cloud your migration may hit a snag when plans change.

5. Poor High Availability planning

Another reason that cloud migrations can stall involves high availability planning. High availability requires more than a bundle of tools or enterprise licenses.  HA requires a careful, thorough and thoughtful system design.  When deploying an HA solution your plan will need to consider capacity, redundancy, and the requirements for recovery and correction. With a plan, requirements are properly identified, solutions proposed, risks thought through, and dependencies for deployment and validation managed. Without a plan, the project and deployment are vulnerable to risks, single point of failure issues, poor fit, and missing layers and levels of application protection or recovery strategies.  Often when there has been a lack of HA planning, projects stall while the requirements are sorted out.

6. Incomplete or invalid testing

Ron, a partner migrating his end customer to the cloud, planned to go-live over an upcoming three day weekend. The last decision point for ‘go/no-go’ was a batch of user acceptance testing on the staging servers.  The first test failed.  In order to make up for lost time due to other migration snags, Ron and team skipped over a number of test cases related to integrating the final collection of security and backup software on the latest OS with supporting patches. The simulated load, the first on the newly minted servers, tripped a series of issues within Ron’s architecture including a kernel bug, a CPU and memory provisioning issue, and storage layout and capacity issues. The project was delayed for more than four weeks to address customer confidence, proper testing and validation, resizing and architecture, and apply software and OS fixes.

The promises of the cloud are enticing, and a well planned cloud migration will position you and your team to take advantage of these benefits. Whether you are beginning or in the middle of a cloud migration, we hope this article helps you be more aware of common pitfalls so you can hopefully avoid them.

– Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS

5 Signs That It Will Take More Than A Blog Post To Fix Your High Availability

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5 signs that it will take more than a blog post to fix your high availability

5 Signs That It Will Take More Than A Blog Post To Fix Your High Availability

The signs are there. The warning lights are flashing.  In your gut, you can sense it. Maybe you can’t sleep.  Your problems with high availability are deep. But, maybe you are not quite sure.

1. If you think your cloud SLA is all you need for high availability

Cloud solutions have provided great advancements in increased hardware availability and resilience. However, application high availability requires more than just selecting the right hypervisor or cloud provider. Your strategy for high availability cannot stop with the SLA provided by the cloud or a virtualization provider. As quoted by Wired, “The almost four-day Amazon outage of April 2011 did not breach Amazon’s EC2 SLA, which as a FAQ explains, “guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a Region over a trailing 365 period.” In this DZone article, our own David Bermingham breaks down the differences between cloud SLAs and application availability in detail. If you want a highly available infrastructure, it must include monitoring, recovery, and resilience at the data and application layers as well.

2. If you are just using the high availability clustering that came with your open source operating system

If so, then chances are you didn’t select your database based on what was bundled with the OS, so why would you select your HA solution based on that criteria alone. Bundled tools go a long way in providing extra assurance, possibilities, and capabilities. However, despite the ease of access, bundled tools and OS clustering software are not always capable of meeting your SLA, RPO, RTO, and availability requirements. If your enterprise has a combination of Operating Systems, your team will likely need help navigating different tools and understanding how they integrate together. It’s kind of like choosing the hedge clippers and push reel mower left on the curb to shape “Azalea” on the 13th hole par 5 (at Augusta). Both lawn mowers are designed to cut grass but how much time do you have? How are you going to handle the complexity? Which would you trust? Your strategy for high availability requires more than just considering the conveniences of what is bundled with the OS, otherwise, you’d be running MySQL instead of SAP HANA.

3. If you think that enterprise application licensing, such as SQL Enterprise or Oracle Enterprise, is the same thing as enterprise high availability

In addition to increased cost, many enterprise application licenses also increase the ability of the application to recover in some high availability scenarios. However, it is highly unlikely that your entire enterprise is based on a single application. Your high availability is going to require more than just a highly available database solution. You’ll need an enterprise grade application monitoring and recovery solution with a breadth of support for all of your applications and databases. In addition, you’ll need the ability to manage and replicate not just database data, but critical application and configuration data as well. Availability for a single database or a simple application is one thing – but HA for a complex, multipart application and supporting database is very different. More services, more parts that need to be coordinated, more complex architecture to orchestrate, more specific best practices to adhere to before, during and after failover/switchover. More than what your enterprise license paid for.

4. If your downtime is growing and your uptime is shrinking

The pace of life is ever increasing in many fields. When was the last time your team recovered from backup, manually restarted the applications that were deemed critical, or restarted a set of failed virtual machines or nodes? The pace of your outage events cannot continue to outpace sustainability, or your team’s ability to move beyond firefighting to fire prevention and fire proofing. “You can only run so hard so long (Carey Nieuwhof).” For some of you, you’ve been firefighting for too long, and your outages are becoming more common than your up-time.

5. If your first failover test was on the production server

A recent client remarked that it is simply impossible to test for every possible disaster scenario. As new software is created, deployed, updated, and patched the challenges in higher availability are increasing. But, your live, production data is not the place to find out what does not play well together. And while Go-Live and Post-Go-Live will always have their share of surprises, the inability to actually failover and run on the backup node should not be one of them.

Scouring blogs can provide you with helpful tips and insights to define, redefine, and improve your higher availability. But, if the warning signs are going off that you’ve traded true availability for some semblance of ‘just enough’, then it will take more than a blog post, or scouring every blog post in the availability world for that matter, to fix your HA.

– Cassius Rhue, Vice President, Customer Experience

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

9 Signs You Have an Application Availability Problem

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9 Signs You Have an Application Availability Problem

You’ve heard the saying “recognizing a problem is the first step in solving it.”  But, many small, medium, and surprisingly, even large enterprise businesses aren’t aware that their application availability isn’t what it should be.

Read on for these nine signs that you still have an application availability problem:

1. You spend more time restarting an application than using it

Application crashes may be a fact of life, but if your application is down more often than it is up, that is a problem.

2. You’ve started to snooze through the alert storm in your inbox or control center

You have deployed alerts for application or server downtime, but the alert storm has so overwhelmed your inbox that you have silenced them all.

3. You have one data center for all your critical operations

A single data center for operations may sound convenient, but one well intended but misdirected construction crew has been known to turn single data centers into costly unavailability zones.

4. Your idea of data protection involves backup retrieval and archives

Your data protection strategy is critical. Data replication technology and site to site, region to region replication has become a mainstay, so if your replication or data protection strategy is non-existent or involves a lengthy jog to the vault this could be a big problem.

5. Your recovery procedures always require manual intervention

Manual intervention itself is not a problem. Some events are so difficult and complex that some amount of manual effort could be required.  But, if manual intervention is always the first, second and third order of business after a server or application outage, that is a problem.

6. Your RTO is measured in days not hours or minutes

How are you measuring your recovery time objective (RTO)? Do you measure your RTO in days or hours instead of minutes per month?  True, every business has a tolerance level for their RTO.  However, your RTO should not be a function of server rebuilds and gross instabilities in your architecture.

7. You don’t know your RPO because your standby is never reliably in sync

You’ve checked the box on reliable monitoring and recovery of your application, and taken it a step further to provide a standby cluster ready system.  Great job.  But, before I let you off the hook, what is your recovery point objective (RPO)? An RPO should be something more accurate than “somewhere between day 0 and last night.”

8. Single points of failure don’t just exist, they are the norm

Where are your single points of failure?  Your budget may not allow you to eliminate every single point of failure, but if you can identify a single point of failure in every major category and every critical component of your enterprise…

9. Your last disaster made local, regional, or national news 

If the last major storm, grid failure, or failure event put a blight on your business due to downtime, then higher availability is the next order of business.

Downtime costs your business in terms of customers, productivity, and peace of mind.  Unaddressed risks have a definite impact on your business and reputation.  If these warning signings are there, you may have an availability problem.  And, if you ignore them you’ll likely have even bigger problems soon thereafter, hence the importance of application availability.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Migrating to the cloud? Here’s how your DevOps priorities should change when you move to Amazon EC2

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Migrating to the cloud? Here’s how your DevOps priorities should change when you move to Amazon EC2

A majority of companies migrating to the cloud, or creating “cloud-native” applications, are doing so with Amazon Web Services (AWS).  AWS offers a lot of cost and functionality advantages.  Companies who have adopted industry-standard developer operations (“DevOps”) best practices for monitoring and managing their on-premise environments often ask themselves how they adapt to their new cloud environments and applications.

How will DevOps priorities change when you move from on-premise applications to Amazon EC2?  Here’s an explanation of the differences between the two and what you should keep in mind.

DevOps priorities in the cloud?  The same. But different.

We often hear customers say that operations will be easier when they move to AWS. We caution them that moving to the cloud (or even AWS) does not mean that they no longer need to monitor and manage their applications.

Companies moving to Amazon AWS can take advantage of lower costs and manpower resources when it comes to hardware procurement, provisioning, and maintenance.  But you need to take into account that when you decide to host applications on Amazon EC2 that anything above the Operating System layer is your responsibility.

When it comes to backup/availability guarantee/security measures, etc. for your Amazon EC2 environments, the priorities are the same as if they were on-premise applications. And Amazon provides some native tools and functionality.  But you need to decide if they are the right fit for requirements.

Security, Backup… What do you need to know when managing Amazon AWS environments?

So what are some of the AWS-specific considerations you need to keep in mind as you move to Amazon EC2?  And what are the right tools for you?  The time you invest upfront in designing your applications and how you will deploy and manage them will pay off.

Your first consideration should be how you will secure your Amazon EC2 applications.  Network design, such as “which ports to open” and “from where to allow access” must be considered in the same way as for your on-premise applications.  These can be configured in AWS using security groups and network ACLs (access control lists).

You can use the AWS Trusted Advisor functionality*, which automatically examines your AWS environment and points out whether or not it is set to the recommended settings, making it possible to check your company’s AWS environment for security issues.  We recommend checking with the AWS Trusted Advisor both at the time of implementation and periodically.

Another essential aspect of security is the management of authentication and access privileges.  AWS consolidates all of these into AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM).  In addition to controlling who can access which EC2 instances, you can also use AWS IAM to set up access permissions from EC2 instances to other resources (such as DBs), etc.  Once you have migrated to AWS, the first thing you need to do is to set up the accounts and access restrictions properly in AWS IAM.

The next consideration is “how will I backup my applications on Amazon EC2?”  Amazon EC2 provides the ability to take snapshots, which allows you to do so.  In addition, using “Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager” makes it easy to set up periodic snapshots, as well as incremental backups.  Snapshot files are stored on the Amazon S3 storage service.  You are charged according to their capacity, so you need to be aware of the amount of data you have and set up such settings as “reduce the capacity by incremental backups” and “delete from old data.”

“Availability” needs to be considered in advance. The key is to operate the system in accordance with the priority level of the system.

The last consideration is availability.  With Amazon EC2 applications, as well as those that are on-premise, you should consider the level of availability required based on cost and system importance. However, if you use Amazon’s Multi-AZ deployment functionality, you can specify a redundant configuration between different data centers.  However, using Multi-AZ costs more than using a single-AZ configuration (although not as much as if you had redundant on-premise systems).  When designing your applications you need to consider whether Multi-AZ is required and how much you should invest in availability.

If you aren’t investing in failover, then you should at least be monitoring your applications and planning how to recover them when downtime is experienced.  You can use Amazon CloudWatch to easily monitor general items such as CPU, memory, and disks, and you can also program the Amazon EC2 Auto Recovery function to automatically recover instances when an error occurs in the EC2.

If your application is mission-critical, then you will want to invest more in its availability.  You should consider many of the excellent third-party solutions that offer valuable functionality to the AWS community.  One choice is SIOS AppKeeper, an easy to configure and use solution that monitors your Amazon EC2 instances and automatically restarts services or reboots instances if they experience system failures.  Here’s a quick video of how AppKeeper works

While moving to the cloud for your applications makes a lot of sense, you cannot abandon DevOps best practices.  Amazon AWS provides you with a rich set of functionalities and tools, but you still need to take primary responsibility for the security, backup and availability of your applications.  How you do this depends on your skills and the importance of the applications themselves.

We invite you to join the hundreds of customers who have been taking advantage of AppKeeper to reduce their Amazon EC2 downtime by signing up for a free 14-day trial of the service.

* Note:  To use AWS Trusted Advisor, a contract for business support or higher is required.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS