The Reality of Continuous Availability

Ever wonder how to accurately calculate high availability and continuous availability? Ever wonder the real difference between clustered and active/active topologies? Ever wonder why the extraordinary cost and effort to put a CA environment in place rarely yields the expected results? Ever wonder how to make CA work without having to sit through vendor presentations or demos? Ever wonder why businesses not needing the “6 nines” of availability commonly found with CA environments are still pursuing CA? Ever wonder if there's more to CA than numbers, calculations, and topologies? Ever wonder what the future holds for continuous availability computing?

While some industries such as Telecommunications have solved the continuous availability issue, other industries such as banking, insurance, and financial markets still find continuous availability a challenging and complex task. These industries typically have a complex and heterogeneous assortment of technologies, platforms, and architecture layers which make designing and implementing continuous availability particularly challenging. Introduce Service Oriented Architecture into the mix, and the issue becomes even more complex.

Come to this vendor-agnostic session to see some of the answers to the mysteries surrounding the black art of continuous availability; all is not what it seems….

While the technical solutions to implement continuous availability are widely known and generally understood, the limitations and constraints of continuous availability generally are not. Just because the technical architecture supports continuous availability does not mean that the applications and systems using that infrastructure can leverage it. In fact, as you will see in this session, application architecture ends up playing an important part of a holistic continuous availability solution.

In this session I will focus on the challenges faced by the financial services industry with designing continuous availability in the application and services layer and how those challenges are addressed. I will start by discussing the use cases and rationale surrounding continuous availability in the financial services industry, then move on to discussing the limitations and challenges faced when designing and implementing continuous availability, both from the technical and application architecture perspective. I will then discuss the vendor-agnostic techniques for resolving the issues and challenges discussed. To bring a real-world focus to this session I will meld into the discussion my experiences of how one of the world's largest banks resolved the issue of continuous availability in a large-scale Service Oriented Architecture environment.

About Mark Richards

Mark Richards is an experienced, hands-on software architect involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of microservices architectures, service-oriented architectures, and distributed systems. He has been in the software industry since 1983 and has significant experience and expertise in application, integration, and enterprise architecture. Mark is the founder of DeveloperToArchitect.com, a website devoted to helping developers in the journey to software architect. He is the author of numerous technical books and videos, including the recently published Fundamentals of Software Architecture, Microservices AntiPatterns and Pitfalls, Microservices vs. SOA, the Software Architecture Fundamentals video series, The Enterprise Messaging video series, Java Message Service, 2nd Edition, and contributing author to 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. Mark has a master’s degree in computer science and is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Symposium Series. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and user groups around the world on a variety of enterprise-related technical topics.

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