https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

Continuous availability

Continuous Availability

Continuous availability in computing refers to the ability of a system or service to remain accessible and operational without interruption, downtime, or degradation in performance. It is a critical aspect of ensuring that applications and resources are consistently available to users, customers, or stakeholders, regardless of external factors or internal failures. Achieving continuous availability requires implementing redundant components, fault-tolerant architectures, and high-availability configurations to minimize the impact of hardware failures, software bugs, network issues, or other disruptions. Technologies such as load balancing, clustering, failover mechanisms, and data replication are commonly used to maintain continuous availability by distributing workloads, automatically redirecting traffic, and ensuring data consistency across redundant systems. Continuous monitoring, proactive maintenance, and disaster recovery planning are also essential components of ensuring continuous availability by detecting and mitigating potential issues before they affect service delivery. Businesses and organizations rely on continuous availability to support critical operations, maximize productivity, and deliver consistent user experiences, ultimately contributing to customer satisfaction and organizational resilience.

Snippet from Wikipedia: Continuous availability: Continuous availability is an approach to computer system and application design that protects users against downtime, whatever the cause and ensures that users remain connected to their documents, data files and business applications. Continuous availability describes the information technology methods to ensure business continuity.
In early days of computing, availability was not considered business critical. With the increasing use of mobile computing, global access to online business transactions and business-to-business communication, continuous availability is increasingly important based on the need to support customer access to information systems.
Solutions to continuous availability exists in different forms and implementations depending on the software and hardware manufacturer. The goal of the discipline is to reduce the user or business application downtime, which can have a severe impact on business operations. Inevitably, such downtime can lead to loss of productivity, loss of revenue, customer dissatisfaction and ultimately can damage a company's reputation.

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