- Redundancy
- Implement redundancy at various levels, including hardware, software, and data.
- Redundancy will eliminate single points of failure.
- Geographical redundancy: Deploy systems in multiple data centers or regions.
- Human and process redundancy: Cross-train staff to perform critical roles and tasks to avoid service disruptions due to the unavailability of specific individuals.
- Failover mechanisms
- Set up automatic failover mechanisms that detect when a primary component fails and redirect traffic to a backup or standby.
- Load balancing
- Deploy load balancers to distribute incoming requests evenly across multiple servers or instances.
- Load balancers can redirect traffic away from failed servers and improve resource utilization.
- Service isolation
- Isolate critical services or components to prevent a failure in one area from affecting the entire system.
- Monitoring and alerting
- Implement monitoring and alerting systems to detect anomalies, performance issues, and failures in real time.
- Regular backups
- Create regular backups of critical data, configurations, and system images.
- Regular maintenance
- Conduct regular maintenance activities, including software updates, patches, and hardware inspections.
- Disaster recovery planning
- Develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that outlines procedures for handling different types of disasters or disruptions.
- Test disaster recovery plans periodically to ensure they are effective.
- Uptime and downtime
- The total uptime and downtime over a specific time period.
- Availability percentage
- The percentage of time that a system is fully operational.
- Percentages of a particular order of magnitude are sometimes referred to by the number of nines or "class of nines" in the digits.
- Downtime frequency
- Track the frequency of downtime incidents over a specific time period.
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)