Fifty Ways to Improve Your High Availability
I love the start of another year. Well, most of it. I love the optimism, the mystery, the potential, and the hope that seems to usher its way into life as the calendar flips to another year. But, there are some downsides with the turn of the calendar. Every year the start of the New Year brings ‘____ ways to do_____. My inbox is always filled with, “Twenty ways to lose weight.” “Ten ways to build your portfolio.” “Three tips for managing stress.” “Nineteen ways to use your new iPhone.” The onslaught of lists for self improvement, culture change, stress management, and weight loss abound, for nearly every area of life and work, including “Thirteen ways to improve your home office.” But, what about high availability? You only have so much time every week. So how do you make your HA solution more efficient and robust than ever. Where is your list? Here it is, fifty ways to make your high availability architecture and solution better:
1. Get more information from the cluster faster
2. Set up alerts for key monitoring metrics
3. Add analytics. Multiply your knowledge
4. Establish a succinct architecture from an authoritative perspective
5. Connect more resources. Link up with similar partners and other HA professionals
6. Hire a consultant who specializes in high availability
7. 100x existing coverage. Expand what you protect
8. Centralize your log and management platforms
9. Remove busywork
10.Remove hacks and workarounds
11.Create solid repeatable solution architectures
12.Utilize your platforms: Public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud
13.Discover your gaps
14.Search for Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)
15.Refuse to implement incomplete solutions
16.Crowdsource ideas and enhancements
17.Go commercial and purpose built
18.Establish a clear strategy for each life cycle phase
19.Clarify decision making process
20.Document your processes
21.Document your operational playbook
22.Document your architecture
23.Plan staffing rotation
24.Plan maintenance
25.Perform regular maintenance (patches, updates, security fixes)
26.Define and refine on-boarding strategies
27.Clarify responsibility
28.Improve your lines of communication
29.Over communicate with stakeholders
30.Implement crisis resolution before a crisis
31.Upgrade your infrastructure
32.Upsize your VM; CPU, memory, and IOPs
33.Add redundancy at the zone or region level
34.Add data replication and disaster recovery
35.Go OS and Cloud agnostic
36.Get training for the team (cloud, OS, HA solution, etc)
37.Keep training the team
38.Explore chaos testing
39.Imitate the best in class architectures
40.Be creative. Innovation expands what you can protect and automate.
41.Increase your automation
42.Tune your systems
43.Listen more.
44.Implement strict change management.
45.Deploy QA clusters. Test everything before updating/upgrading production
46.Conduct root cause analysis exercises on any failures
47.Address RCA and Closed Loop Corrective Action reports
48.Learn your lesson the first time. Reuse key learnings.
49.Declutter. Don’t run unnecessary services or applications on production clusters
50.Be persistent. Keep working at it.
So, what are the ideas and ways that you have learned to increase and improve your enterprise availability? Let us know!
