high availability

This blog post is an introduction to a few posts that can be grouped together under the banner of 'System Architecture'. Specifically, I'm referring here to Oracle Database System Architecture, not system architecture in general nor 'Oracle architecture' in general, which is an ever-growing beast. In this series of posts, I will take at look [...]

This is a post about the importance of appropriately simplistic architectures. I frequently get involved with the creation of full-stack architectures, and in particular the architecture of the database platform. There are some golden rules when designing such systems, but one of the most important ones is to keep the design as simple as possible. [...]

Amazon EC2′s high-profile outage in the US East region has taught us a number of lessons.  For many, the take-away has been a realization that cloud-based systems (like conventionally-hosted systems) can fail.  Of course, we knew that, Amazon knew that, and serious companies who performed serious availability engineering before deploying to the cloud knew that. In cloud environments, as in conventionally-hosted environments, you must implement high-availability if you want high availability.  You can’t just expect it to magically be highly-available because it is “in the cloud.” Thorough and thoughtful high-availability engineering made it possible for EC2-based Netflix to experience no service interruptions through this event.