Application availability | SIOS SANless clusters

Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)

July 30, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Planning is Key to Enterprise Availability (and to a Happy Marriage)

Planning dates and getaways, fabulously romantic dinners are a great part of loving your spouse well. Seminars and workshops overflowing with tips for improving your relationship abound in nearly every area of the world.

But, listen in on the training session provided by SIOS Technology Corp. Project Manager for Professional Services, Edmond Melkomian, and you’ll quickly learn that planning dinners and anniversary retreats aren’t the only way to love your spouse well.

In a recent class on SIOS Protection Suite for Linux, Edmond shared three tips that help you love your spouse well in an enterprise world: plan, plan, plan.

1. “Plan to plan” your enterprise availability solution

In his course, Edmond Melkomian asked students to name the first thing you should do when deploying an enterprise solution. His answer, “Plan, plan, plan.” It seems obvious, but the first step is to start making the plan. A fairly decent start for a plan includes developing the details for each of the project phases, such as milestones, checkpoints, risks, risk mitigation and strategies, stakeholders, timelines, stakeholder communication plans. A decent plan will also include details about kickoff, sign-off and closure, and resources (staffing, management, legal/contracts).

Plan to create, review, modify, and update your plan throughout the solution lifecycle.

2. Plan what to deploy for enterprise availability

Plan what to deploy. It is likely that a large portion of your enterprise infrastructure exists beyond the realm of the current team’s lifespan with your company. As you migrate to the cloud, or update your availability strategy, it is worth the time and effort to make a plan regarding what to deploy. Focus your plan on ensuring that you deploy redundancy at all critical components, network, compute, storage, power, cooling, and applications. All data centers and cloud providers typically ensure cooling, power, and network redundancy to start.

A number of firms offer architectural teams, cloud solution providers, availability experts, application architects, and migration specialists who help teams discover critical and sometimes hidden dependencies as well as high risk areas vulnerable to Single Points of Failure (SPOF’s). This investigative work will feed into your plan of what to deploy and/or update in your availability strategy.

Plan on reviewing what you need to deploy.

3. Plan to keep a QA/pre-production cluster for reliable availability

When I was in the SIOS Technology Corp. development team, I’ll never forget a Friday night call with a long time, but frantic customer. Earlier in the month a frequent customer unsuccessfully deployed a new software solution into a production environment. The result was a massive failure. He called our 800 number at 4:30pm (EST) on Friday. Why do I recall that exact time? Friday was date night. My wife and I had dinner plans, a babysitter for the six girls on standby (by the hour), and hopes for a romantic and relaxing evening. I was just about to head out for the day when the phone rang. After a tense first hour, we were back up and running. This unfortunate episode could have been avoided or mitigated by keeping a UAT or QA system on hand.

As Harrison Howell, the Software Engineer for Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. noted in his blog 6-common-cloud-migration-challenges the limits of on-prem are no longer the same limits.

Customers coming from an on-prem system need to remember that resources are no longer a limiting factor. In the cloud, systems can be effortlessly copied and run in isolation of production, something not trivial on-premises. On-demand access to IT resources allows UAT of HA and DR to expand beyond “shut down the primary node”. Networks can be sabotaged, kernels can be panicked, even databases can be corrupted and none of this will impact production! Identifying and testing these scenarios improves HA and DR posture.

Plan on deploying and keeping a UAT system for HA and DR testing. As Harrison mentions, “identifying and testing [issues]” “improves [your overall] HA and DR posture,” and that improves your chances of a successful date night.

4. Plan regular maintenance and updates (including documentation)

Lastly, plan times for regular maintenance and updates to maintain Enterprise Availability. Your enterprise needs to remain highly available to remain highly profitable and successful. Environments don’t remain stagnant, and patches, security updates, expansion, and general maintenance are a regular occurrence from inception to retirement. Creating a plan for how and when you will incorporate updates and maintenance into your enterprise will ensure that you are not only kept up to date, but that you minimize risks and downtime while doing it. Be sure to include in your plan the use of a test system. Develop a planned routine and process for validating patches, kernel and OS updates, and security software, and don’t forget to update the project documentation and future plans as you go and grow.

If you can remember to plan for a highly redundant, highly reliable and highly available system upfront, plan to keep a QA/Pre-production cluster after Go-Live, and plan for regular maintenance and updates you will also be able to keep your plans with your spouse for date night. And not just date night, but you’ll also be able to keep your night’s free from 3am wake up calls due to down production systems. This is my tip for loving your spouse well.

I love my wife and so I help customers deploy SIOS Technology Corp.’s DataKeeper Cluster Edition and SIOS Protection Suite for Windows and Linux products as a part of a highly available enterprise protection solution. Contact SIOS.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Article reproduced with permission from SIOS

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

July 12, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

What is Amazon CloudWatch

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

What you can do with CloudWatch and some hurdles to consider

With AWS boasting a dominant share of the cloud market, many companies are migrating their on-premises systems to the cloud with Amazon AWS. So, how should a system running in the AWS environment be managed?

In this blog post, we will introduce the features of Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring service provided by AWS, as well as the challenges of implementing it and how to solve them.

Using Amazon CloudWatch to closely monitor your AWS environment

To ensure that you have a stable cloud environment, it is important to detect anomalies (“system impairments”) quickly and respond in a timely manner. Monitoring becomes an important and necessary task for any organization moving to the cloud. This is no different than if you were managing on-premises applications and infrastructure. So, how should you monitor in an AWS environment? One choice is to use Amazon CloudWatch, which monitors CPU, memory, and disk usage and notifies you when a predetermined threshold is exceeded. Plus, you can set up your own metrics to monitor various items such as application logs.

The best part about Amazon CloudWatch is that it’s a service provided by AWS itself. It has a high affinity with Amazon EC2 and other AWS services, so it can quickly respond to frequent functional extensions and specification changes, and can easily support AWS Auto Scaling, which automatically increases or decreases resources according to the load. Amazon CloudWatch provides precise monitoring tailored to each environment’s unique circumstances.

Amazon CloudWatch implementation challenges

While Amazon CloudWatch is an ideal fit for organizations with experienced cloud engineers and DevOps teams, there are some things the average users should be aware of.

Amazon CloudWatch is effective for monitoring an organization’s AWS environment, but it requires a certain level of skill and knowledge to configure and deploy. Especially when you set your own metrics, are setting up alerts, or taking into account Auto Scaling, the complexity increases. For example, If you’re setting up monitoring, it’s easy, but if you’re setting up email, rebooting, AutoScaling, etc., depending on the resource situation, it can be difficult.

If you want to automate the recovery process with instructions such as “restart the server when an error occurs”, you must first create a recovery scenario with an AWS Lambda script that provides a detailed description of the conditions and actions to be taken. How familiar is your team with AWS Lambda?

The principal advantage of Amazon CloudWatch is that you can monitor your environment closely, but in order to do that, you must properly design in advance for each system what items to monitor and when, threshold values, etc. These design tasks can take a lot of time. Of course, your mission-critical systems need to be closely monitored in this way, but this level of detail and sophistication is not appropriate for all systems. For some, such as internal websites or WordPress servers, you will want to minimize your operating and labor costs. In such cases, we would like to suggest you consider a tool that can be more easily operated and managed.

SIOS AppKeeper for monitoring operating systems and application services running on AWS

For non-mission critical applications, we would like to recommend SIOS AppKeeper from SIOS Technology. AppKeeper is easy to install and configure and monitors the services (processes) of the application running on the EC2 instances. AppKeeper automatically restarts the service when an error is detected and reboots the instance if necessary. Even users moving to the cloud for the first time can set up AppKeeper to monitor their EC2 instances and recover automatically, without needing to have sophisticated scripting skills.

With AppKeeper, there is no need to select individual services to be monitored. You simply start by selecting the EC2 instances to be monitored and what actions you would like to be taken automatically. You can always get more specific about which services to monitor and how, but AppKeeper is designed to be easy to configure out of the box. When an error is detected or automatically restored from, a log of the failure is recorded and stored so that the cause of the failure can be investigated later.

AWS EC2 Monitoring with AppKeeper

Rather than using Amazon CloudWatch to closely monitor everything in your AWS environment, we recommend that you take inventory of your environment based on your SLAs and recovery requirements, and use SIOS AppKeeper to monitor systems and applications where you want to reduce your operational overhead.

Stay tuned for a future blog post where we will go into greater detail comparing how to set up CloudWatch and AppKeeper to perform the same functions.

Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper

Case Study: AWS EC2 Monitoring Solution relieved a global manufacturing company from stress as it moved to the cloud.

July 7, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Tokyo Diamond Tools Manufacturing Protects Important Applications with SIOS AppKeeper

Founded in 1932, Tokyo Diamond Tools Mfg. Co., Ltd. manufactures diamond tools for cutting, slicing, polishing, and drilling processes in a wide range of fields such as home electronics, semiconductors, electronic devices, healthcare and civil engineering. Although it is a long-established company with over 80 years of history, Tokyo Diamond has always been aggressively introducing new IT tools. The company decided to move to Amazon AWS and virtualization for speed and efficiency of business improvements. SIOS AppKeeper played an important role in providing the application availability protection they needed. One of the reasons for Tokyo Diamond Tools’ move to the cloud and AWS was the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Although there was no direct damage to the servers at the head office, equipment at the Sendai plant in the Miyagi Prefecture dropped out of the rack, causing serious damage. Tokyo Diamond saw the need for a better business continuity plan. This was a primary driver for the shift to virtualizing their core systems and using cloud environments.

At first, the company started migrating relatively small applications to the cloud. “We started the move around November 2011. At that time, we had no choice but AWS,” said Mr. Takuji Kokubo, the head of IT Systems at Tokyo Diamond. They managed operations themselves using Sony Network Communications’ “Managed Cloud with AWS” cloud portal. Mr. Kokubo, is a self-described “One Man IT operation,” so efficiency and automation are important to enable the smooth operations of the company’s IT systems, at locations in Japan as well as in Singapore and Thailand.

Takuji Kokubo, Tokyo Diamond Tools — Mr. Takuji Kokubo,
Head of IT System
Tokyo Diamond Tools Mfg. Co., Ltd.

The move to the cloud and identifying the need for a recovery solution

Diamond Tools implemented Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, a cloud storage service. They moved their groupware, sales support and video conferencing systems to AWS. Diamond Tools’ video conferencing system is critical to their daily operations. “It is a tool that is very frequently used in various conferences and meetings with overseas locations. It is used about 100 times a month, and with the transition from a conventional pay-as-you-go SaaS system to AWS, we could reduce the cost as much as two million yen a year,” said Mr. Kokubo. Previously, voice quality often dropped when too many users including other companies connected to the system at the same time. Then Mr. Kokubo would receive a complaint from users but the problem could not be solved easily. Building a company-specific video conferencing system on AWS has stabilized video and audio quality and reduced complaints.

Mr. Kokubo soon experienced issues with their EC2 environment. “EC2 is stable as an infrastructure; however, sometimes services on it fail. I was always worried, and one day, during an overseas business trip, I got a call saying that users could not access the system. I had to open my laptop, which I carry all the time, to connect to AWS via VPN and recover the failed service,” said Mr. Kokubo. Clearly this process was not scalable.

Service failures frequently occurred on the instance where the groupware application ran. Most of the company employees use the groupware application every morning to check the calendar or book meeting rooms. “Many people would call me to ask what was going on if they experienced issues,” said Mr. Kokubo. He learned the risks of taking care of the system by himself through this experience.

“Ten years ago, systems would stop when there was a failure, and users were used to that. Today, however, I get complaints as soon as anything stops. Now, systems are expected to be up and running all the time, like water that comes out of a tap anytime. System downtime is becoming more and more unacceptable,” said Mr. Kokubo.

Mr. Kokubo always felt that he had to take care of any issue when one of the services running on EC2 failed. Being the only person able to address any issues continued to be a burden for him. Mr. Kokubo said, “Being a one man IT shop, I tend to consider that my value lies in only providing a help desk function. But it’s not good – I needed to consider how I can make the systems of Tokyo Diamond work without my support.”

Because he was the only IT professional at a company that was relying more on cloud services, he knew he needed help. “When Sony Network Communications told me that SIOS AppKeeper provides automated operations and management of EC2 instances, I decided to use it even before looking into the details. If we could have a solution that recovers EC2 services automatically, then I wouldn’t need to troubleshoot every issue by connecting to VPN on-the-go,” Mr. Kokubo added.

SIOS AppKeeper is a cloud service that monitors EC2 instances and restarts services automatically when it detects any system impairments. When a monitored service fails SIOS AppKeeper recovers the service automatically without having to have personnel intervene manually.

More than 10 Applications Running on AWS

Tokyo Diamond has continued to migrate other applications to AWS, and by June 2018 had more than 10 applications running on AWS. “I feel that AWS is useful: the operating system starts in 10 minutes and resources can be scaled up/down flexibly depending on the business. We can even delete a resource even if it does not work. However, the core system that processes a large volume of data was migrated to a virtual environment using a data center, not AWS. We are using both AWS and a virtual data center to build a system depending on the usage and needs,” said Mr. Kokubo.

Tokyo Diamond currently monitors three critical applications that employees rely on with AppKeeper, including their groupware application, sales force automation and their video conferencing system. Mr. Kokubo said, “First, we classified our applications and decided to start with three of them. It is worth paying a fee if I can be freed from the daily mental burden and get peace of mind during a business trip.”

SIOS AppKeeper Enables IT Personnel to Focus on Other Tasks

According to Mr. Kokubo, he no longer needs to think about the operations and management of the instances monitored by AppKeeper. AppKeeper is working perfectly. It has freed up his time to focus on the virtual machines and their other AWS applications. Mr. Kokubo feels that AppKeeper brings him a sense of security about these core applications.

However, he does have a request for the SIOS Technology development team about AppKeeper. “If there are no events, I’m worried about whether it’s working properly, or I may forget how to login. It would be better if it notified me frequently that it is working,” said Mr. Kokubo. Automatic operations and management are the strength of SIOS AppKeeper; however, it can be invisible when nothing happens.

Having said that, Mr. Kokubo agrees that it is very beneficial that he is freed from having to troubleshoot these applications. Now he can spend more time on management, including evolving Diamond Tool’s IT strategy and planning, security, and BCP initiatives.

Although today Diamond Tool uses SIOS AppKeeper for the operations and management of three applications, it plans to extend AppKeeper’s coverage to other applications soon. This will enable Mr. Kokubo to spend much time on those value-added activities. “Even if we try to hire system personnel, it is difficult because Japan’s workforce is shrinking. In the future, I expect system tools to replace people using AI (Artificial Intelligence), and I hope SIOS AppKeeper also develops AI-like functions to automatically address high-impact failures,” said Mr. Kokubo, hoping for a day when further automation of operations management will be realized.

Learn more about SIOS AppKeeper

Enterprise Availability: Lessons from the Court

June 29, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Enterprise Availability: Lessons from the Court

I love basketball. I love to play it, watch it, and think through the cerebral aspects of the game; the thoughts and motivations, strategy and tactics. I like to look for the little things that work or fail, the screen set too soon or the roll that happened too late. I like defense and rotation. I like to know the coaches’ strategy for practice, walkthroughs, travel, and so on. So naturally a few months ago, when I had a day off from the 24/7 world of availability, imagine that, I took my day off to watch basketball, and more specifically my daughter’s middle school basketball practice.

About a third of the way through watching, I couldn’t contain myself. I whistled to and “prodded” the young girl lollygagging and trotting up the court and yelled, “Run! Hustle!” And she did, as did the teammates within earshot. The next few minutes, plays, and drills were filled with energy, crisp cuts, smooth motions, and drive. But, it didn’t last. Instead, there were more whistles required, more emphatic pleas to move and run, to play hard, make sharp cuts, dive, pay attention, focus, learn, and correct. When the 2 hours were nearly over I took my last moment of attention to prophesy, “The way you practice will be the way you play!”

I can almost feel you channeling the spirit of AI, not Artificial Intelligence (AI), Allen Iverson (AI). “Are we talking about, practice. Practice!” I thought this was about availability. Well, my love for basketball met my passion for availability when I considered my daughter and her teammates. How?

Three Ways Basketball Strategies Are Like Availability Strategies:

In basketball, every team needs a plan, ditto for enterprise availability.
In basketball, every team needs to practice that plan, ditto for availability, disaster recovery, and especially planned maintenance.
In basketball, the plan when tested under fire will hold up only as good as those plans were practiced

Enterprise Availability Needs a Plan

Your availability, specifically your disaster, planned maintenance, and outage recovery strategies, are only as good as those you create. Simply put, what is your plan for an outage (note clouds fail, servers crash, networks get saturated, and human error— enough said). Do you have a documented plan? Do you have identified owners and backups owners? Do you know your architecture and topology (what server does what, where is it located, what team does it belong to, what function does it serve, what business priorities are tied to it, and what SLO/SLA does it require)? Who are your key vendors, and what are their call down lists? What are your checkpoints, data protection plans, and backup strategies? And what are your test plans and validation plans for verification of this plan?

Enterprise Availability Needs Practice

A good plan, check. Now what about practice. Implementing disaster recovery steps and unplanned outage strategies are a necessary component of every, every enterprise configuration. But, a strategy that is not rehearsed is not really a strategy. In that case it is simply a possible and proposed approach. It is more like a suggestion, rather than an actual plan of record. The second step is practice. Walk through the strategies of your plan. Rehearse maintenance timings. Restore backups and data. Validate assumptions and failure modes.

Enterprise Availability Requires Testing

A plan and a walkthrough, check. Now that you have two of the three let me go back to my daughter’s team. My parting words, as an “unofficial coach “ were as follows: “The way you practice will be the way you play!” Fast forward three days. The game is down to the final minutes. The team they are playing is athletically mismatched, and outsized just as they were last year when that year’s game was over by halftime. But this year, the undermanned and undersized team had clearly come in more prepared. What should have been an easy win now enters the final minute nearly tied. The home team, the opponent, begins a press— something my daughter’s team had prepared for, albeit haphazardly and lethargically, during that fateful practice. What ensued wasn’t pretty. Four unforced turnovers, two critical fouls during three-pointer attempts, a four to nothing run, and a bevy of frustrations culminating in a devastating one-point loss as time expired.

My final point, how well are you practicing for your real outage, disaster, or planned maintenance? Do you practice with real data, real clients, and with a real sense of urgency? How often does your upper management check-in? Trust me, the presence of a boss in pressure-packed moments makes people do strange and unwise things! Does your sandbox and test system look like production? In a past life, I once worked with a customer who had different hardware, storage and Linux OS versions between prod and QA. When they went into prod with application updates, disaster struck hard. Do you have users and data, and jobs that run during your testing? What about actual disaster simulation? It’s a hard pill to swallow, testing a hard crash with potentially destructive consequences, recovery from offsite, and even harder to simulate simultaneous multi-point, multiple systems failures, but the unpracticed is often the weak point that turns a 2 hour planned maintenance into an eight-hour multi-team corporate disaster. The under-practiced or poorly practiced is the difference between a stunning victory for your strategy and team, or a crushing defeat and costly failure for team, vendors, enterprise, and customers.

In basketball, the plan under fire will hold up only as good as the plan was practiced. When implementing a recovery and disaster plan a good plan and validation are key, but great practice is king.

Contact a rep at SIOS to learn how our availability experts and products can help you with the plan, procedures, and practice.

Visit back for a post on tests you should never avoid simulating.

— Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Article reproduced from SIOS

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

April 7, 2020 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper

Managing Alert-Stress for AWS EC2 with SIOS AppKeeper Has this ever happened to you? You receive an alert about an application issue when you are out of the office, and you don’t have the information you need to address it? And you either need to access your cloud management console from an inconvenient location or pass the information on to another colleague to address? Or you are investigating an alert when another one comes in requiring your attention? Research has shown it can take the average person 23 minutes to recover from unexpected interruptions.

With companies moving to the cloud and having to manage more complex computing environments, this “alert stress” is starting to take a toll on workers’ productivity and mental health. Cloud monitoring solutions are trying to give you more information so you can resolve issues faster, but the depth of information they provide and the volume of alerts can be overwhelming.

Is Application Performance Management for AWS Enough?

Migrating to an AWS cloud infrastructure means that you often have to adopt new ways of managing and monitoring your applications. You can take advantage of AWS’s native cloud management functionality for your EC2 environment. But many companies quickly outgrow the functionality of these tools and deploy commercial Application Performance Management (APM) solutions for wider coverage and deeper insights.

But here’s the thing. These sophisticated APM solutions can be creating more work for you. Yes, they often come with alert notification workflows to put the right information into the right person’s hands quickly. But they do very little to fix the situation without manual intervention. The result: lots of stress-inducing alerts needing your immediate attention.

That’s why we created SIOS AppKeeper. It is the industry’s first out-of-the-box solution to automatically respond to service outages on Amazon EC2 instances. AppKeeper allows companies to protect applications from service interruptions and downtime while eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming manual intervention.

AppKeeper Automatically Restarts Failed Services in AWS EC2

SIOS AppKeeper not only identifies and sends notifications for failures. But it will also automatically attempt to restart failed services or reboot the instance if necessary. Our users have found that AppKeeper automatically addresses almost 85% of the application service failures that occur. Without having to disrupt you, your I.T. or Development team or third-parties.

SIOS customers and partners in Japan have been using SIOS AppKeeper since 2017 to protect their AWS environments. ForgeVision is an AWS Advanced Consulting partner, integrates AppKeeper into its cloud management console. It has been allowing it to monitor and recover customers’ failures more cost-effectively. And AppKeeper is allowing Hobby Japan, a publishing company in Tokyo, to create a maintenance-free, low-cost environment.

We invite you to learn more about SIOS AppKeeper by watching this short video or by signing up to use AppKeeper for free until June 30th.

Then you can see for yourself what it’s like to have systems failures in AWS EC2 automatically addressed.

– Daisuke Yoshioka, Manager, Business Development for SIOS AppKeeper.