 Hi, this is Yoho Sapin Bharti and welcome to another episode of TFI. Let's talk and today we have with us Matthew Pollard Customer experience software engineer at Scios Technology. Matthew is great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me Can you talk about the importance of high availability for modern businesses? Is it for specific businesses or you know, this is something that you know, of course every business Should have at some label or the other we've been seeing in the business world recently a huge uptick in Like you said just how important these central applications and softwares and databases and such Especially the data how important that is to have it available at all times to have it ready to use any time that that's not there It can't be accessed. It can't be brought up. It can't be connected to What you're looking at is a severe loss of money You're losing money from your clients not being able to connect you losing money from your departments not being able to log the transactions You're losing money in the opportunity cost of your employees that you're having to pull off of what they should be doing to fix it So because those outages are so costly You start rolling in a level of redundancy and in this case, that's high availability How easy it is to to kind of build a high availability strategy Or it's like something which is like a bit complex. There are a lot of challenges associated with that Which might at times deter teams to build a very good high availability strategy So there is a lot of complexity in a high availability environment There's a like you mentioned a lot of components to take into To take into account You've got your networks. You've got your operating systems your storage layer Even the platform itself like you talked about data centers. You talked about cloud platforms But those aren't perfect even when they have their own layers of redundancy There are still issues that they might run into So there's a lot of pieces that are working together Not only with your database with your application But with each other And then when you start scaling it out into a high availability environment where you have server clusters as opposed to a single server Then instead of having to worry about Just all these things happening on the first server Then you have to take into account all the same stuff can be happening on the second server But then it goes even farther to well What can go wrong between server one and server two now? So it's not even a linear increase. It goes beyond that So it is complicated and that's what makes it more important that you have Experts in high availability that you can refer to and get assistance from to help you set up and configure your environments So do you think that the the modern id teams? They are fully prepared to deploy ha, you know or have a very you know holistic ha strategy for their infrastructure I would say in most cases no because there is a lot of unique legwork that has to be done to get ready for a high availability deployment researching Not only the solutions that are available to you and what they can provide but you need to really dig into What do they provide versus what do I need and start communicating internally? And with your clients and customers if you have any of those to determine what your slas are what your requirements are your rto's Your recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives for your data and availability So there's a lot of that that needs to be laid out as groundwork first But even in actually deploying it there's a lot of considerations that you wouldn't have to make in a normal environment such as monitoring Communications to a server that may not actually be doing anything At that time just to make sure that it's available as a standby And you're not losing your availability in a hidden sort of way What leads to this complexity? You know or as you said, you know, of course, they are moving parts when it comes to having, you know, once again building HAA practices or you know, of course Whole HAA strategy I just want to like pinpoint some of the challenges that are there so that we can look at how professional services come and help them Can you talk about the challenges that are there or what what what creates that's those challenges? Some of it comes in the initial configuration. It's very easy to miss small things between servers Especially depending on how you do your internal documentation your Your internal guides and runbooks and such It's very easy to fall into a pitfall where something is slightly misconfigured between the servers So what works beautifully on the first one when the first one has a failure? And you expect everything to come up on the next one because you have high availability Something might go wrong A lot of the complexity comes in after you've deployed the environment and the way of troubleshooting where You might see everything working beautifully in the same kind of scenario on the node where everything's running But something in the central services Of the application you're using or the database something in a very low level layer Could break and you might not know because nothing's been running over there So then you have some kind of issue when things try to move from one server to another and then you have to go in And you have to figure out what's actually going wrong how to fix it And a lot of times you see extra pressure on your teams because There's a chance that when this is coming it might not be during a test or some kind of scenario It could be an actual failure or an actual outage So now you're under pressure from your customers from your dependence on the availability of the applications too now let's talk about when we look at these challenges these complexities and limited know how expertise of in-house teams What kind of professional services are available to assist IT teams so they can implement High availability or HA practices. So there's services You can look at them in a couple of categories if you want to ones that you can get before you deploy the environment Ones that you can get while you're deploying the environment and those that are available after So before and to a degree during can be kind of the same thing here A lot of that has to do with getting services for actually configuring and installing your high availability solutions And that ties somewhat into making sure that your applications or your databases are configured correctly for the high availability solution to use them correctly And then while you're deploying it There's usually services for some kind of standby resource a standby engineer Or something of that nature where if you run into an issue And typically during a maintenance or a go live or something where you've got a set window of time That you have to have this completed in you can have during that window of time But that dedicated standby resource that will join and quickly help you recover from whatever issue that you might experience with a short response time And then once you actually have the configuration deployed You can still use those other services either for regular maintenance or for when you're standing up even more High availability environments after that first one But there's also things like configuration and validation Or configuration health checks and validations that you can have run on your environments To make sure that everything was done right you're following best practices You don't have anything that might cause issues or even outages later on So you can proactively Prevent those from happening and even get some kind of training engagement where you can have your internal teams trained by the solution provider So that they can more effectively administer and configure The solution itself as these teams, you know, they look at working with the professional services Do they need to do some kind of homework or how they should prepare their organizations? So that when external teams come there to help them, they are fully prepared Or you need like no, you don't need to do any Any work the professional service they will come and they will do all the highlighting all the like work there There's definitely some groundwork that needs to be laid in the form of Communicating between all your internal teams. We've already talked a lot about their storage networks so forth and so on a lot of different things that usually Depending on the size of the organization will have different teams dedicated to working on them And since ha will usually be covering all of these different components It's important to make sure that all of the teams involved are on the same page And that you have someone who might be Ready at any point to jump in and assist with the professional services vendor to help Resolve some kind of issue. Let's say in the networking layer They need to jump on a call with them and fix the issue to keep everything moving on the appropriate time frame And really just making sure that everyone's aware of the needs and what is going to be going on in the professional services And that's just for keeping it smooth Of course once you have worked with the professional service and you do have a high availability strategy there Is it more or less like hey, it's a one time solution or it's kind of high availability is like security It's a process It's a journey not a destination And if that is the case does that also mean that organizations should also kind of build build a culture within their teams To look at high availability as a holistic versus, you know one time solution I would definitely say that it's more about the journey because like anything you're going to get it set up initially and you're gonna Maybe it's fine. Maybe it's not but there's always room for improvement There's always improvements in the actual solution that you're going to be using There's always ways that you can look to expand that coverage into other parts of your organization other services How you can group things together how you can organize them? But especially like you mentioned how you can make your teams aware of high availability and make sure that they start Becoming more knowledgeable on it and work around it and that can help your internal Issues can be resolved quicker. Maybe you don't have to engage the vendor as much. You have a more knowledgeable team They stop having to open As many cases with the vendor because it's a simple issue. Oh, we've seen this before and we've encouraged you to learn from it We've incorporated it into our documentation or our runbooks We can fix this ourselves and it's quick and easy to start and now since you talked about vendor So let's bring the vendor in what value does syos bring? Do such IT teams, you know as a professional services to provide high availability For most I would say that at syos the biggest advantage is that we are a dedicated high availability provider As opposed to some other products where they may have optional high availability components as Something that you can configure or turn on. This is what we do at syos is provide and maintain high availability environments for our customers We also have very well defined packages of services Which makes it easy to either look at if you have it Given to you by a representative or discuss with your sales representative And see this is what I can get and for each of those services that I can get This is the value that I'm going to get out of it Which makes it not only easy to choose which one you want to use But it makes it easy to determine. Okay, so if I'm getting this This is what it's saving me from and also this is how I can Take this proposition and bring it within my company to my Management my leadership or even just the rest of my team and say this is what we're going to get And as we were discussing, you know that it's cultural is technology. You have to do a lot of groundwork What advice do you have not only from the perspective of how Organizations who don't have any high availability strategy they get started But also once they have as you said it's a journey So just give us, you know some some tips how they should approach it My first big piece of advice would be just when you do that groundwork be really thorough Make sure that not only do you know what your SLAs are your requirements for the business and for your end customers Make sure the vendor knows that too because that can be an important context of the way that two of you interface with each other And communicate and come to an agreement And then like you said once you actually have high availability and you have environments that you're using Just be proactive with them keep them in your mind It's often a pitfall that when you have high availability in your environment Some people might just forget about it until there's an issue with it So there might be some kind of problem with the high availability solution Or with the standby resources that are supposed to take over to provide high availability And then all of a sudden when you actually run into a problem You realize at that point that you didn't have high availability and you're experiencing an outage when you didn't expect to So it's not just something you can drop in and everything's going to be fine You know in the world for the rest of time. It's something you still have to monitor It is a solution like any other that you're using with your software with your applications You have to make sure to check on it make sure that it's running. Okay that everything's working correctly So that when the time comes for it to do its job, it can do it Unimpeded Matthews. Thank you so much for joining me today. Talk about of course Share the whole insights on a bottom of high availability But also how it teams can get started with it. Thanks for all those insights and I would love to check with you again. Thank you Thank you for having me