Going cloud means automatic resiliency, right? Yes and no. It depends on what you are doing in the cloud.
Building resilient applications on the cloud is a combination of using the resilient features that are offered by IBM Cloud and aligning them with your business objectives.
The underlying cloud infrastructure is designed to avoid a single point of failure with the following features:
- Redundant power feeds
- Redundant network devices and connections
- Redundant systems
Well, you get the point.
We’re going to talk through some of the resiliency features that are provided to you, and what you can do to further improve your resiliency when you are using IBM Cloud VPC. This blog post is the first of a multi-part series.
Is resiliency automatic?
Yes, you are automatically protected from a single point of failure at the system and network level.
This applies whether you are looking to move some of your workloads or developing your applications in the IBM Cloud VPC.
IBM Cloud VPC offerings are designed to automatically protect you against a shared single point of failure at the hardware and network level. VPC is a multi-zone region (MZR). Each VPC contains multiple availability zones that are interconnected with redundant high-speed connections; thus, ensuring robust business continuity.
For example, when you order a virtual server instance (VSI), the VSI is instantiated on a system that has redundant power, fans and dual network connections. It can also be automatically migrated due to certain events to ensure the highest uptime.
Similarly, other VPC service offerings, such as LBaaS or VPN Gateways, provide redundant systems to give you the highly available service with no action needed by you.
Keep in mind, resiliency can differ between services, so it is highly recommended that you always read through the documents.
So I don’t need to do anything?
No, there are additional steps you can take to improve your resiliency.
Other actions that you can do to improve your overall resiliency strategy include the following:
- Ensure you distribute the VSI workload and cluster resources correctly across zones.
- Take advantage of anti-affinity through VSI placement groups.
- Set up auto-scale to dynamically add and remove VSIs based on workload.
- Set up snapshots for backup and disaster recovery.
You should take the time to plan your workload and VSIs and set up the auto-scale, placement groups and snapshots features. It is easy to forget these tasks when you are doing a million other things, but they are a critical part of protecting your workloads and applications.
Automation help
We also provide some Terraform scripts to help automate setting up your infrastructure in a resilient manner. The scripts can be used as a tutorial or can be modified to your business and application requirements.
What’s next?
Stay tuned, but for now, take a look at some of these helpful links:
Was this article helpful?
YesNo