I can’t count the number of times that something in IT has failed me. I’ve had a laptop hard drive crash the day before a conference, a smoking power supply in an email server, and failed network interfaces on a core router. And don’t even get me started on OS, driver, and firmware updates! I’m sure that anyone who works in IT would love to share horror stories about situations they’ve had to deal with--usually problems that happened late at night or at a critical time for the business. Is there ever such a thing as a good failure, and at a nice time?
If you anticipate failures in IT, you learn to plan and design your applications to accommodate problems. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use Azure high availability and redundancy features to minimize disruptions caused by maintenance updates and outages. This chapter builds a foundation for the next two or three chapters as you start to move from an application that runs on a single VM or web app to one that can scale and be globally distributed.
If you want customers to trust you for their important pizza business, you must supply applications that are accessible whenever they need them. Most customers won’t look for “hours of operation” on a website, especially if you work in a global environment and customers could be from all over the world. When they’re hungry, they want to eat!