13 Achieving High Availability: Availability zones, auto-scaling and CloudWatch

 

This chapter covers

  • Recovering a failed virtual machine with a CloudWatch alarm
  • Using auto-scaling to guarantee your virtual machines keep running
  • Understanding availability zones in an AWS region
  • Analyzing disaster-recovery requirements

Imagine you run an online shop. During the night, the hardware running your virtual machine fails. Until the next morning when you go into work, your users can no longer access your web shop. During the 8-hour downtime, your users search for an alternative and stop buying from you. That’s a disaster for any business. Now imagine a highly available web shop. Just a few minutes after the hardware failed, the system recovers, restarts itself on new hardware, and your e-commerce website is back online again—without any human intervention. Your users can now continue to shop on your site. In this chapter, we’ll teach you how to build a high-availability system based on EC2 instances like that.

Virtual machines are not highly available by default, the potential for system failure is always present. The following scenarios could cause an outage of your virtual machine:

13.1 Recovering from EC2 instance failure with CloudWatch

 
 

13.1.1 How does a CloudWatch alarm recover an EC2 instance?

 
 
 

13.2 Recovering from a data center outage with Auto Scaling Group

 
 

13.2.1 Availability zones: groups of isolated data centers

 
 
 

13.2.2 Recovering a failed virtual machine to another availability zone with the help of auto-scaling

 
 
 
 

13.2.3 Pitfall: recovering network-attached storage

 

13.2.4 Pitfall: network interface recovery

 
 
 

13.2.5 Insights into availability zones

 
 
 

13.3 Architecting for high availability

 
 
 

13.3.1 RTO and RPO comparison for a single EC2 instance

 
 
 

13.3.2 AWS services come with different high availability guarantees

 
 
 
 

13.4 Summary

 
 
 
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