Downtime is the scourge of any business. A cease in operations due to an IT failure can directly affect your bottom line, not to mention the damage it can cause to your relationship with customers.
A report published in early 2018 revealed that IT downtime cost UK businesses £3.6 million, on average, every year. The report also stated that 545 hours of staff productivity were lost each year as a result of IT outages. Can your business afford to risk such costly problems?
Having a reliable infrastructure is a real advantage for any business and a quality that is highly valued by customers. Knowing that the services and systems they need will always be operational boosts customers’ confidence in a company and its product.
To help its customers achieve reliability and perfect their cloud operations, Amazon Web Services sets out well-defined standards for best practice in the design and implementation of cloud operations, known as the Well-Architected Framework.
The Third Pillar: Reliability
With reliability being such a sought-after quality for businesses utilising the cloud, it makes sense for Amazon to have made it the third pillar of their Well-Architected Framework.
As an Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Partner, the Isotoma team has the ability to evaluate the structure of AWS implementations and determine how reliable they are.
By comparing the implementation against Amazon’s best practice, as defined within the Well-Architected Review Framework, we can enhance the reliability of your cloud operations. We will ensure that your system has the ability to:
- Recover from infrastructure or service disruptions.
- Dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand.
- Mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
Arrange Your Free AWS Well-Architected Review
The Well-Architected Programme is funded by Amazon, meaning our review — and up to five days of work spent carrying out our recommendations — are completely free.
If you’ve heard enough and want to arrange your free Well-Architected Review, simply get in touch. Otherwise, read on to learn how our review will help your business achieve improved reliability.
The Design Principles of Reliability
Isotoma’s experienced team of cloud architects will use their expertise in the design principles of reliability to conduct a comprehensive review that evaluates your implementation to discover areas for improvement.
Test Recovery Procedures
In an on-premises environment, testing is often conducted to prove the system works in a particular scenario; testing is not typically used to validate recovery strategies. In the cloud, the Isotoma team can test how your system fails and validate your recovery procedures.
We use automation to simulate different failures or to recreate scenarios that led to failures before. This exposes failure pathways that we then test and fix before a real failure scenario occurs, reducing the risk of components that have not been tested before failing.
Automatically Recover from Failure
We can help you monitor your system for key performance indicators (KPIs) and trigger automation when a threshold is breached. These KPIs should be a measure of business value, not of the technical aspects of the operation of the service. This allows for automatic notification and tracking of failures, and for automated recovery processes that work around or repair the failure. With more sophisticated automation, it is possible to anticipate and remediate failures before they occur.
Scale Horizontally to Increase Aggregate System Availability
To reduce the impact of a single failure on the overall system, we can replace one large resource with multiple small resources. This means requests can be distributed across multiple, smaller resource, ensuring that they don’t share a common point of failure.
Stop Guessing Capacity
A common cause of failure in on-premises systems is resource saturation, when the demands placed on a system exceed the capacity of that system. This is often the objective of denial of service attacks. As your system in located in the cloud, our experts can help you monitor demand and system utilisation, and automate the addition or removal of resources to maintain the optimal level to satisfy demand without over- or under-provisioning. There are still limits, but some limits can be controlled and others can be managed
Manage Change in Automation
Changes to your infrastructure should be via automation. We will work with you to ensure any changes that need to be managed are changes to the automation.
See How You Could Achieve Reliability with a Free AWS Well-Architected Review
If you’re interested in improving the reliability of your AWS implementation with a free Well-Architected Review, we’d love to hear from you.