High Availability Cloud Computing Infrastructures – What Are They & How Can They Help?
One of the up and coming buzzwords you will hear frequently in 2014 is High Availability Cloud Computing. This model of cloud computing equates to what most people are thinking about when they think about the cloud in general. However many companies have not yet fully trusted the public cloud therefore they have decided to build out private clouds or hybrid clouds. Consider this scenario: Your development team produces a new release of an existing application that seems to go well during the testing phases. On day one of the launch, application developers are pulling their hair out wondering why the application isn’t responding as anticipated and servers you have running the application aren’t responding. What can you do?
In a high availability cloud setting, a backup server would be spun up and the backup image will be dropped on it automatically as soon as certain performance thresholds are met. Subsequently, more servers will be on standby that can be added to the cluster as needed. In private cloud setups, overall resources may be eclipsed due to physical hardware constraints. This could happen depending up on the actual hardware present. Also, many cloud platforms do not have this automatic fail over solution included by default.
Many within the CloudStack community have adapted this model. If your organization deploys applications in this fashion, a high availability cloud built using CloudStack is probably the best option for your company. Many providers will be advertising the fact that their systems are high availability. You can look for this to become a trend as cloud based public, private and hybrid hosting becomes the norm. With so many developers from technology giants like IBM and Red Hat joining the CloudStack project, you can look forward towards high availability being the standard out of the box method of utilizing cloud computing resources within large organizations.
