Guest: Matthew Pollard (LinkedIn)
Company: SIOS Technology
Show: Mission Critical
Topic: High Availability

Cloud providers tout their redundant storage and infrastructure resilience. But a critical question remains: are your applications actually protected, or just the servers they run on?

Cloud architects wrestling with high availability face a common misconception: that native cloud redundancy equals complete application protection. Matthew Pollard, Customer Experience Software Engineer at SIOS Technology, explains why this assumption leaves enterprises exposed.

The Monitoring Spectrum SIOS Covers

SIOS high availability solutions extend beyond basic server health checks. The platform monitors storage IO performance to ensure applications can read data for queries and write updates without interruption. Network monitoring tracks reachability across nodes, verifies communication paths between clusters, and validates replication traffic flow. Heartbeat tracking ensures cluster nodes remain in sync.

“There are components in the SIOS products for network availability, both specific to what certain applications will require, reachability of different services across different nodes,” Pollard explains. This comprehensive approach catches failures that infrastructure monitoring misses.

Where Cloud Providers Stop and SIOS Starts

The distinction matters because cloud providers and third-party HA solutions operate at different layers. Cloud redundancy focuses on the infrastructure: the virtual machines, storage volumes, and network fabric that host your applications. SIOS operates at the application layer, where business logic executes and customer transactions occur.

“If you are using any HA solution in a cloud environment, you’re getting both of them,” Pollard notes. But understanding what each layer protects is crucial for architects designing resilient systems.

Cloud infrastructure redundancy cannot detect application-level failures, orchestrate application failovers, or manage maintenance windows for software updates. These capabilities require application-aware monitoring that understands service dependencies, data replication status, and failover policies.

The Application Layer Imperative

Modern applications operate in complex distributed environments. A database cluster spans multiple availability zones. Web servers connect to caching layers, message queues, and API gateways. Each component presents potential failure points that infrastructure monitoring cannot detect.

SIOS fills this gap by monitoring the entire application stack. When a database replica falls behind on replication, SIOS detects the lag before it impacts queries. When network latency spikes between cluster nodes, SIOS triggers alerts before transactions fail. When storage IO performance degrades, SIOS can initiate failover to healthy nodes.

“There’s this whole other layer that’s equally important at the application level, where products like SIOS high availability products come in and monitor and protect and orchestrate switchovers, failovers, monitoring, enabling maintenance,” Pollard emphasizes.

For enterprises running mission-critical workloads, this dual-layer protection is non-negotiable. Infrastructure redundancy prevents hardware failures. Application-level HA prevents service disruptions. Both are essential, and neither can replace the other.