Achieving Continuous Resilience with Appranix Site Reliability Automation
In the age of Continuous Integration and Delivery of systems to achieve ever faster application development and deployments, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) need to constantly think about the resiliency of the production systems to satisfy demanding Service Level Objectives (SLO).
Continuous Resiliency is about operating systems in production and DR simultaneously with a promised Service Level Objective. It is about keeping the systems running continuously even while accepting new changes from the developers as well as bringing the systems to a running state even after a disaster or unplanned event as quickly as possible. Of course, running systems at 100% is impossible but near 100% availability is achievable with the right type of automation. As explained in the popular SRE book https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/service-level-objectives.html, It is about setting the right expectations for the users of the systems. Defining a Service Level Objective based on an “availability” Service Level indicator will help operations teams or SREs to work or automate towards achieving a balance. Traditionally, when systems run in a data center, IT operations team will take a two-pronged approach.
- They will take the changes to a running system with a measured pace with a bunch of accepted change requests.
- Handle the disaster or unplanned event completely separately because it is unrelated to an already released software change. Large organizations, this process is typically outsourced to a third party provider.
This legacy approach has changed dramatically with more and more systems running on hyperscale cloud platforms. Multi-region provisioning can now be automated without the need for outsourced third-party providers with dedicated data centers. However, the same flexibility has also emphasized the need for running systems in a second region of the cloud provider an essential component of the operation. More importantly, automation platforms that automate most of the Site Reliability Engineering for availability required for re-hosted, re-factored or re-written systems running on the cloud platforms are now possible. It is now easier than ever to combine the above two separate complex operational activities to deliver a meaningful Service Level Objective that leads to a much better customer satisfaction.
Why Site Reliability Automation (SRA)?
Many born in the cloud large business critical SaaS applications have some form of automation for Site Reliability to allow operation teams to take the changes continuously. However, the majority of the systems that move to the hyperscale clouds end up operating at the same level of availability as the legacy data center and in-fact they are less prepared for the unplanned downtimes. Many companies are not even aware that cloud virtual machines or services could go down any time. In fact, cloud IaaS providers suggest customers create a second zone or second regional protection with snapshots. To help customers prepared, they suggest several approaches, including managing snapshots better and using the snapshots in another region properly by wiring a bunch of management services with complicated manual scripting.
Running systems on containers have solved some of these problems. However, managing consistent Kubernetes clusters along with data is way more complicated for an average SRE or cloud operations team.
Appranix Site Reliability Automation System
Appranix SRA is an industry first born-in the cloud automation system that delivers Continuous Resiliency for the enterprise systems and microservices. It delivers, protects and optimizes workloads running on cloud virtual machines, containers and associated services for Site Reliability Engineers. Appranix is an Enterprise Management Associates Top 3 platform. Read more at https://www.appranix.com/product/platform.html
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Contact Appranix
Email: sales@appranix.com
Website: www.appranix.com
Phone: +1 508–656–0756
