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How a Client Connects to the Active Node

June 15, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How a Client Connects to the Active Node

How a Client Connects to the Active Node

As discussed earlier, once a High Availability cluster has been configured, two or more nodes run simultaneously and users connect to the “active” node. When an issue occurs on the active node, a “failover” condition occurs and the “standby” node becomes the new “active” node. When a failover occurs there must be a mechanism that either allows a client to detect the failover condition and to reconnect, or a seamless transfer of the user’s active client session to the active node.

A Virtual IP Address

Usually a “virtual” IP address is created when a cluster is configured and the client communicates with the active node using a virtual IP address. When a failover occurs, the virtual IP address is reassigned to the new active node and the client reconnects to the same virtual IP address.

As an example, let us assume that there are two nodes, A and B, with IP addresses of 10.20.1.10 and 10.20.2.10. In this example, we will define a virtual IP address of 10.20.0.10 which should be considered to be assigned to the current active node.

This is similar to assigning a second IP address to one network interface card on one node. If the command ip a is entered on the active node, both IP addresses will appear (as on lines 10 and 12 in this Linux example):

The ARP Protocol

When a client attempts to find a server using an IP address, the client typically uses ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) to find the MAC (Media Access Control) address of the target machine.

Once a client broadcasts a message to find the target IP address, the active node answers with its MAC address and the client resolves the request and connects to it.

ARP Alternatives for the Cloud Environment

In the cloud environment, however, it is not possible to identify the active node using ARP as many layers are abstracted in the virtual environment. An alternative method based on the network infrastructure in use in the specific cloud environment may be required. There are normally several options, and a selection should be made from the following list.

  • AWS Route Table Scenario
  • AWS Elastic IP Scenario
  • AWS Route53 Scenario
  • Azure Internal Load Balancer Scenario
  • Google Cloud Internal Load Balancer Scenario
Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Active Node, Cloud

How Workloads Should be Distributed when Migrating to a Cloud Environment

June 7, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

How Workloads Should be Distributed when Migrating to a Cloud Environment

How Workloads Should be Distributed when Migrating to a Cloud Environment

Determining how Workloads (nodes) should be distributed is a common topic of discussion when migrating to the public cloud with High Availability in mind. If workloads are located within an on-premise environment, more often than not the locations of these workloads are defined by the location(s) of established datacenters. In many cases choosing another location in which to host a workload is not an available option. With a public cloud offering there are a wide range of geographical regions as well as availability zones to choose from.

An Availability Zone is generally analogous to one or more datacenters (physical locations) being located in the same physical region (e.g., in California). These datacenters may be located in different areas but are connected using high-speed networks to minimize connection latency between them. (Note that hosting services across several datacenters within an availability region should be transparent to the user).

As a general rule, the greater the physical distance between workloads, the more resilient the environment becomes. It’s a reasonable assumption that natural disasters such as earthquakes won’t affect different regions at the same time (e.g., both U.S. west coast and east coast at the same time). However, there is still a chance of experiencing service outages across different regions simultaneously due to system-wide failures (some cloud providers have previously reported simultaneous cross-region outages such as in the US & Australia). It may be appropriate to consider creating a DR (disaster recovery) plan defined across different cloud providers.

How Workloads Should be Distributed when Migrating to a Cloud Environment

Another perspective worthy of consideration is the cost to protect the resources. Generally the greater the distance between workloads, the more costs are incurred for data transfer. In many cases, data transfer between nodes within the same datacenter (Availability Zone) is free while it might costs $0.01/GB or more to transfer data across Availability Zones. This additional cost might be doubled (or more) when data is transferred across regions (i.e. $0.02 / GB). In addition, due to the increased physical distance between workloads, greater data latency between nodes should be anticipated between locations. Through consideration of these factors, generally speaking, it is recommended to distribute workloads across Availability Zones within the same Region.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: availability, Cloud, workloads

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

January 9, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

In some way or another, the world-changing events of 2020 and 2021 have reshaped nearly everything that we knew, and high availability was no exception. Despite closures and restrictions, many IT teams traded on-prem data centers for the cloud.  Many are asking, ‘Now what?’  Here are five things to do to fix your cloud journey in 2022.

  1. Add high availability

    In the push to the cloud many IT and business leaders found themselves rushing to move services and applications from data centers that they were closing due to COVID-19 into the cloud. Others rushed to the cloud, not because of data center closures, but to deal with the wave of exploding demand. For some, the journey to the cloud was so fast that HA wasn’t included, and now they’ve discovered the hard way that applications still crash in the cloud and that unexpected outages and unplanned downtime are still the nemesis of AWS, Azure and GCP as much as they were in their previous data center.

    The first step in fixing your cloud journey is to add a c. This will mean several things to your enterprise:

    • Designing and architecting a highly available and redundant architecture
    • Choosing software and services that will protect critical components and applications
    • Defining and documenting associated processes and procedures, and at least a minimal governance
    • Deploying production copies for quality assurance, procedural testing, and chaos testing
  2. Expand for higher availability for disaster recovery

    Of course, not everyone made the move to cloud without considering some form of HA. Some IT teams had the foresight to not leave HA on-premises, but in the rush to cloud moved all of their critical servers to the same cloud Availability Zone. While having some HA protections is better than complete vulnerability, if you’ve only deployed your servers and applications in a single Availability Zone (AZ), now is the time to expand to multi-AZ for your standby cluster node, or even build in disaster recovery by deploying a third node in a different region. SIOS’ has helped dozens of customers plan multiple-AZ architectures and add disaster recovery solutions.

  3. Build your team

    Overnight some companies, and their IT teams, went from being fully on-premises to wrestling with Cloud Formation Templates, QuickStart Guides, IAM roles, internal load balancers, Overlay IPs, and deciphering what exactly that VM size means.  Now is the time to build a team to support the journey to the cloud.  This will mean several things:

    • Adding capacity.  Unless you were able to pull off a complete lift and shift, you likely have the same staff managing cloud and on-premises applications.  Legacy solutions are known for being temperamental and requiring a lot of work to keep them stable and available.To navigate the cloud journey ahead you’ll need capacity capable of addressing availability requirements, understanding cloud architecture, and plotting the course forward for enterprise needs.
    • Augmenting skills with training.  Give your team training for the cloud.  To manage and plan the course forward, look for ways to augment the IT excellence within your organization with additional training on cloud solutions, architecture, best practices, and trade-offs.  A confidently trained staff will not only pay dividends in increased availability, but they will also pay dividends by addressing availability, maintenance, and growth in an economic, scalable and logical way.  Translation: they’ll avoid wasting money as they build out the rest of your cloud infrastructure.
  4. Integrating automation and analytics

    As VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. I have worked with several companies that made the move to the cloud in 2021 without sacrificing HA, DR or their team.  If you took achieving the required number of nines of uptime (99.99%)  seriously and having a disaster plan was non-negotiable then it’s time to add the rigor of analytics and additional monitoring. Ensure that your availability solution has application-aware automation and orchestration for recovery in the event of a disaster or unplanned downtime. Add analytics and automation to solidify your solution and take your cloud migration up another notch from one of reactive failovers to proactive notification and mitigation of the failure before it occurs.  Imagine being notified of underperforming applications, or of increasing latency, errors, or VM non-responsive behavior in time to avoid downtime in the peak business times. Analytics are also important as they can reveal systems and applications that may have escaped your original availability architecture.

  5. Update processes and governance

    Many things we think of as a failure are rooted in a failure of process. Make sure that your organization’s processes are up to date, well-documented, properly communicated and adhered to. These processes should contain a few key minimums related to who, what, when, where, and how all tied back to the business strategies, goals, and organizational needs as they pertain to the customer.

    Make sure that ownership and sign-off processes for your new cloud environment are well-documented. I have seen firsthand the frustration that comes from conflicting, clashing or unresolved roles and responsibilities for customers who have moved from hardware teams that acquire infrastructure to cloud teams. Muddling through a migration is one set of pain points, digging out of a disaster without clear governance is a much bigger, more costly issue.

    If you’ve made the leap to cloud, staying there and making it work for you is the next part of the journey.  If your cloud journey was sudden or rocky, consider these five points for fixing your cloud journey and know that SIOS Technology can help you improve not only your high availability in the cloud, but also your processes for running in the cloud.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Cloud, High Availability

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

October 30, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

If this topic sounds confusing, we get it. With our experts’ advice, we hope to temper your apprehensions – while also raising some important considerations for your organisation before or after going multi-cloud. Planning for disaster recovery is a common point of confusion for companies employing cloud computing, especially when it involves multiple cloud providers.

It’s taxing enough to ensure data protection and disaster recovery (DR) when all data is located on-premises. But today many companies have data on-premises as well as with multiple cloud providers, a hybrid strategy that may make good business sense but can create challenges for those tasked with data protection. Before we delve into the details, let’s define the key terms.

What is multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is the utilization of two or more cloud providers to serve an organization’s IT services and infrastructure. A multi-cloud approach typically consists of a combination of major public cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

Organizations choose the best services from each cloud provider based on costs, technical requirements, geographic availability, and other factors. This may mean that a company uses Google Cloud for development/test, while using AWS for disaster recovery, and Microsoft Azure to process business analytics data.

Multi-cloud differs from hybrid cloud which refers to computing environments that mix on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.

Who uses multiple clouds?

  • Regulated industries – Many organizations run different business operations in different cloud environments. This may be a deliberate strategy of optimizing their IT environments based on the strengths of individual cloud providers or simply the product of a decentralized IT organization.
  • Media and Entertainment – Today’s media and entertainment landscape is increasingly composed of relatively small and specialized studios that meet the swelling content-production needs of the largest players, like Netflix and Hulu. Multi-cloud solutions enable these teams to work together on the same projects, access their preferred production tools from various public clouds, and streamline approvals without the delays associated with moving large media files from one site to another.
  • Transportation and Autonomous Driving – Connected car and autonomous driving projects generate immense amounts of data from a variety of sensors. Car manufacturers, public transportation agencies, and rideshare companies are among those motivated to take advantage of multi-cloud innovation, blending both accessibility of data across multiple clouds without the risks of significant egress charges and slow transfers, while maintaining the freedom to leverage the optimal public cloud services for each project.
  • Energy Sector – Multi-cloud adoption can help lower the significant costs associated with finding and drilling for resources. Engineers and data scientists can use machine learning (ML) analytics to identify places that merit more resources to prospect for oil, to gauge environmental risks of new projects, and to improve safety.

Multi-cloud disaster recovery pain points:

  • Not reading before you sign. Customers may face issues if they fail to read the fine print in their cloud agreements. The cloud provider is responsible for its computer infrastructure, but customers are responsible for protecting their applications and data. There are many reasons for application downtime that are not covered under cloud SLAs. Business critical workloads need high availability and disaster recovery protection software as well.
  • Developing a centralized protection policy. A centralized protection policy must be created to cover all data, no matter where it lives. Each cloud provider has its unique way of accessing, creating, moving and storing data, with different storage tiers. It can be cumbersome to create a disaster recovery plan that covers data across different clouds.
  • Reporting. This is important for ensuring protection of data in accordance with the service-level agreements that govern it. Given how quickly users can spin up cloud resources, it can be challenging to make sure you’re protecting each resource appropriately and identifying all data that needs to be incorporated into your DR plan.
  • Test your DR plan. Customers must fully screen and test their DR strategy. A multi cloud strategy compounds the need for testing. Some providers may charge customers for testing, which reinforces the need to read the fine print of the contract.
  • Resource skill sets. Finding an expert in one cloud can be challenging; with multi-cloud you will either need to find expertise in each cloud, or the rare individual with significance in multiple clouds.

Overcoming the multi-cloud DR challenge

Meeting these challenges requires companies to develop a data protection and recovery strategy that covers numerous issues. Try asking yourself the following strategic questions:

  • Have you defined the level of criticality for all applications and data? How much money will a few minutes of downtime for critical applications cost your organization in  end user productivity, customer satisfaction, and IT labor?
  • Will data protection and recovery be handled by IT or application owners and creators in a self-service model?
  • Did you plan for data optimization, using a variety of cloud- and premises-based options?
  • How do you plan to recover data? Restoring data to cloud-based virtual machines or using a backup image as the source of recovery?

Obtain the right multi-cloud DR solution

The biggest key to success in data protection and recovery in a multi-cloud scenario is ensuring you have visibility into all of your data, no matter how it’s stored. Tools from companies enable you to define which data and applications should be recovered in a disaster scenario and how to do it – whether from a backup image or by moving data to a newly created VM in the cloud, for example.

The tool should help you orchestrate the recovery scenario and, importantly, test it. If the tool is well integrated with your data backup tool, it can also allow you to use backups as a source of recovery data, even if the data is stored in different locations – like multiple clouds. Our most recent SIOS webinar discusses this same point; watch it here if you’re interested. SIOS Datakeeper lets you run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform without sacrificing performance, high availability or disaster protection. SIOS DataKeeper is available in the AWS Marketplace and the only Azure certified high availability software for WSFC offered in the Azure Marketplace.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Amazon AWS, Azure, Cloud, disaster recovery, GCP, Google Cloud Platform, multi-cloud, public cloud

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

October 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

High Availability & the Cloud

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

While researching reasons to migrate to the cloud, you’ve probably learned that the benefits of cloud computing include scalability, reliability, availability, and more. But what, exactly, do those terms mean? Let’s consider high availability (HA), as it is often the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud for many companies.

The idea is to make your products, services, and tools accessible to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection. That means ensuring your critical applications are operational – even through hardware failures, software issues, human errors, and sitewide disasters – at least 99.99% of the time (that’s the definition of high availability).

While public cloud providers typically guarantee some level of availability in their service level agreements, those SLAs only apply to the cloud hardware. There are many reasons for application downtime that aren’t covered by SLAs. For this reason, you need to protect these applications with clustering software that will detect issues and reliably move operations to a standby server if necessary. As you plan what and how you will make solutions available in the cloud, remember that it is important that your products and services and cloud infrastructure are scalable, reliable, and available when and where they are needed.

Quick Stats on High Availability in the Cloud in 2021

Now that we’ve defined availability in the cloud context, let’s look at its impact on organizations and businesses. PSA, these statistics may shock you, but don’t fret. We’ve also got some solutions to these pressing and costly issues.

  1. As much as 80% of Enterprise IT will move to the cloud by 2025 (Oracle).
  2. The average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $11,600 per minute (Gartner; Comparitech).
  3. Average IT staffing to employee ratio is 1:27 (Ecityworks).
  4. 22% of downtime is the result of human error (Cloudscene).
  5. In 2020, 54% of enterprises’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud, while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud (Forbes).
  6. 1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan (HBJ).
  7. 70% of companies have suffered a public cloud data breach in the past year (HIPAA).
  8. 48% of businesses store classified information on the cloud (Panda Security).
  9. 96% of businesses experienced an outage in a 3-year period (Comparitech).
  10.  45% of companies reported downtime from hardware failure (PhoenixNAP).

What You Can Do – Stay Informed

If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, join us. The SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium is taking place Wednesday, September 22nd (EMEA) and Thursday, September 23rd (US) in a global virtual conference format for IT professionals focusing on the availability needs of the enterprise IT customer. This event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Cloud Symposium Speakers & Sessions Posted

We have selected speakers presenting a wide range of sessions supporting availability for multiple areas of the data application stack. Check out the sessions posted and check back for additional presentations to be announced! Learn more

Register Now

Whether you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, this event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Register now for the SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium.

Reproduced from SIOS

Filed Under: Clustering Simplified Tagged With: Application availability, Cloud, cloud migration, disaster recovery, High Availability

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