What are the best practices for ensuring server uptime in mission-critical applications?

Ensuring server uptime in mission-critical applications is essential for maintaining business operations and data integrity. Some best practices to achieve: ? Redundancy: ? Load Balancing: ? Monitoring and Alerting: ? Regular Maintenance and Patch Management: ? Backup and Disaster Recovery: ? Fault-Tolerant Architecture: ? High Availability Database Solutions: ? Scalability and Capacity Planning: ? Data Center Redundancy: ? Automated Failover and Recovery: ? Network Redundancy: ? Security Measures: ? Regular Testing: ? Documentation and Procedures: ? 24/7 Support and Incident Response: ? Staff Training: By implementing these best practices, you can significantly improve server uptime and ensure the reliability.

- Create an active-active infrastructure across two or more locations. - Replicate data across these sites in real time. - Load balancing & load Sharing are essential for ensuring the availability levels. - Dry run your H/A clusters at least once a year to ensure you are meeting the SLAs defined.

Redundancy and load balancing are two critical strategies for ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and improved performance in mission-critical applications. Combining redundancy and load balancing can significantly enhance the availability and performance of your mission-critical applications

There should be redundancy at every layer of the entire system. In case of servers, the redundancy can come in multiple forms - The server themselves are redundant like multiple servers behind a load balancer to serve the request - The uplinks of the server are redundant. You should have at least 2 links to each TORs - The upstream device is redundant i.e the server connects to two TORs over VPC. - The power supply of the server is redundant. For example, you can have dual power supply on active-standby connected to different power strips which itself are connected to different power inlets.

A Backup and Disaster Recovery Server (BDR) is a virtualized server where you keep a copy of your main server, including all of your essential data so that in case of a hardware failure, you are fully backed up and ready to restore operations. A smart backup and disaster recovery plan can ensure that business continuity is not impacted by unexpected events such as network failures or natural disasters

Redundancy and load balancing are two critical strategies for ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and improved performance in mission-critical applications. Combining redundancy and load balancing can significantly enhance the availability and performance of your mission-critical applications. These strategies are essential for modern, highly available architectures in cloud and data center environments.

In order to provide highly resilient and available infrastructure for hosting your mission critical workloads the company would have to have look at multi-pronged strategy. the below could help address it. 1- Hardware Resiliency- Look at hosting you workloads into (Separate Power/Storage/compute, etc.) within a premise or datacenter. 2- Datacenter Resiliency- It is always good to have your critical workloads being replicated to another low latency datacenter near your primary region and follow the same approach of spreading the workload. This will help mitigate the concern of datacenter level failure. 3- Out of Region Redundancy -Pre-Provision a warm DR setup in another region to provide recovery in case of Disaster to primary region

Example strategies for ensuring continuous operations include maintaining redundant copies of an application as well as the IT systems and data center infrastructure on which it runs; performing hot backups; and using duplicate staging and production environments for thorough testing.

SLA (Service Level Agreement): Establish and adhere to SLAs to set clear expectations for server uptime and performance. Regularly review SLAs and adjust them based on evolving business needs and technological advancements.

Documentation: Maintain comprehensive documentation of server configurations, network topology, and application setups. Document procedures for troubleshooting and resolving common issues.

Monitoring and maintenance are essential practices for keeping mission-critical applications and systems running smoothly. They involve continuously tracking system performance, identifying issues, and applying proactive and reactive measures to ensure reliability and availability. Monitoring and maintenance are ongoing processes that help you identify and address issues, improve performance, and ensure the long-term reliability of mission-critical applications and systems. Regularly review and update your monitoring and maintenance strategies to adapt to changing business requirements and technological advancements.

Security and compliance are critical aspects of network engineering and information technology. They go hand in hand, as compliance with security standards and regulations is essential for safeguarding sensitive data and protecting an organization's infrastructure. In network engineering, security and compliance efforts are ongoing and require a proactive approach. Regular assessments, audits, and risk management are crucial for maintaining a secure and compliant network environment. Collaboration with legal, compliance, and cybersecurity teams can help ensure that your network engineering practices align with organizational goals and legal requirements.

Optimization and testing are essential components of network engineering to ensure that network infrastructure operates efficiently and reliably. Optimization and testing are ongoing processes in network engineering, and they are crucial to maintaining a reliable and efficient network environment. Regularly assess, tune, and test your network infrastructure to adapt to changing requirements and emerging challenges. Additionally, documentation of network configurations and testing results is essential for troubleshooting, compliance, and future planning.

Look at implementing a software-as-code infrastructure. This will provide a more visible distribution which can be better evaluated when undergoing change review. Consider using tools like Puppet, Chef, or Desired State Configuration. By doing so mission critical servers can be built in a relatively short period of time.