By Moving workloads to the cloud gives you the cloud provider’s infrastructure redundancy. It does not protect the applications, databases, and services running inside those systems. Organizations that treat cloud migration as an HA strategy discover this gap only when a failure occurs and nothing fails over as expected.
In this interview on TFiR, Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, breaks down why application-level high availability requires its own dedicated solution set and why that solution must be actively maintained as environments change.
Guest: Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology
Show: TFiR
Here is what every platform engineer, infrastructure architect, and operations team needs to know.
Technical Deep Dive
Q: Does migrating to the cloud automatically provide high availability for your applications and databases?
Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, explains that cloud migration provides redundancy and reliability for cloud-managed infrastructure components, but this does not extend to everything running inside those systems. Applications, databases, and other workload-level components still require a dedicated high availability solution configured specifically to provide redundancy and failover capabilities. Organizations that assume cloud infrastructure coverage translates to full workload protection are operating with a significant gap in their resilience strategy.
“It wholly neglects everything inside the systems, your applications and other components in the systems that do need a specific high availability solution set up to protect them, to provide redundancy and failover capabilities.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: Why do teams still treat high availability as a one-time setup rather than a continuous operational process?
Pollard observes that organizations commonly treat high availability as a set-it-and-forget-it component, but modern environments are constantly evolving. New services are added, existing ones are removed, and infrastructure is reshuffled on a regular basis. Each of those changes can affect the high availability solution just as much as the applications it protects, meaning HA must be proactively maintained, planned around, and included in patching and maintenance procedures to remain effective.
“Environments are complicated in the modern day. They are constantly evolving. New things are being added, things are being taken away, reshuffled, and reorganized. Every one of those changes can impact your applications, databases, systems, and high-availability solutions. Each component in that stack needs to be proactively maintained.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Q: What happens when infrastructure changes are made without accounting for the high availability solution?
When patching, maintenance, or infrastructure reorganization is performed without including the HA solution in that planning, teams risk silently breaking failover readiness. A component that the HA solution depends on may be removed, or a new component may be introduced that the solution is not configured to handle. The failure mode is particularly costly because the gap only becomes visible at the exact moment the HA solution is needed most.
“You might pull something out from under it, you might add something that it’s not accounting for. Then, when an issue arises, it’s not prepared to handle it. And now you’re finding out about that problem when you need high availability solutions to be doing their job.” — Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer, SIOS Technology
Resources & Documentation
- SIOS Technology, high availability clustering software for cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments
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👇 Click to Read Full Raw Transcript
Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you explain why simply moving to the cloud doesn’t solve or guarantee high availability?
Matthew Pollard: What a lot of organizations seem to think is once they get into the cloud, they inherit some kind of high availability protection for everything. And to a certain degree you do, because you get redundancy and reliability around a lot of the cloud managed infrastructure components. But it wholly neglects everything inside the systems, your applications and other components in the systems that do need a specific high availability solution set up to protect them, to provide redundancy and failover capabilities.
Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you also talk about why do teams still treat high availability as a one time setup instead of a continuous process? I mean, we have seen this in security space, right? It used to be a security, you did it once. It’s someone else’s problem. But things are changing and I feel that just the way we have the whole DevSecOps movement with high availability also it cannot be treated as, you know, someone else’s problem or something. You set it, opens and forget about it.
Matthew Pollard: Yeah, and we certainly do observe organizations treating high availability as this type of set it and forget it type of component in your environment. But environments are complicated in the modern day. They are evolving constantly. New things being added, things being taken away, reshuffled, reorganized, and every one of those, as much as it can impact your applications, your databases, your systems, your high availability solution is something in that stack that does need to be proactively maintained, planned around and included in, for example, your patching and your maintenance procedures. Otherwise you might pull something out from under it, you might add something in that it’s not accounting for. And then when you have some kind of issue, it’s not set up to be prepared to handle that. And now you’re finding out about that problem when you need high availability solutions to be doing their job.
