Chapter $5$ Availability

Open questions:

Availability:

What are the different ways to measure and quantify availability? Explain the strengths and limitations of each method.

How does the desired level of availability vary depending on the system's purpose and target audience?

Discuss the trade$-$off between achieving high availability and minimizing cost and complexity.

How can the impact of downtime on stakeholders and business operations be factored into architectural decisions?

What are the ethical considerations involved in designing for high availability, especially in life$-$critical systems?

Availability General Scenario:

Describe a real$-$world scenario where a system outage caused significant consequences. Analyze the factors that contributed to the outage and how they could have been addressed through architecture and design.

How do external factors like natural disasters, network outages, or cyberattacks influence the availability of a system?

Describe the different recovery strategies $($e$.$g$.,$ failover, rollbacks$)$ available and discuss their suitability for different scenarios.

How can the architecture be designed to minimize the time to recovery $($TTR$)$ after a failure?

How can user testing contribute to identifying and mitigating potential availability issues before deployment?

Tactics for Availability:

Compare and contrast different techniques for redundancy $($e$.$g$.,$ hot standby, active replication, distributed computing$)$ in terms of their benefits and drawbacks.

How can monitoring and logging be used to proactively identify potential availability issues before they occur?

What are the key considerations for implementing fault tolerance mechanisms in a distributed architecture?

How can automation be leveraged to improve availability, such as automated failover, scaling, and self$-$healing mechanisms?

Discuss the role of disaster recovery planning and testing in ensuring long$-$term system availability.

A Design Checklist for Availability:

How does the choice of programming language and development frameworks influence the availability characteristics of a system?

What are the key infrastructure considerations for building highly available systems, such as network design, hardware redundancy, and disaster recovery measures?

How can security measures be implemented without compromising overall system availability?

How can the design facilitate ongoing maintenance and updates without impacting system availability?

What documentation and communication strategies are essential for ensuring ongoing awareness and understanding of availability requirements throughout the system lifecycle?