Being resilient is the most important thing in all aspects of a business. It is very important that your cloud applications are resilient to achieve business continuity. Cloud well-architecture frameworks define resilience as the ability for the entire system, including applications and their cloud infrastructure to be available and recover quickly after any type of failure. Let us take an example of a medical record application hosted in a public cloud environment and assume all the covid patient’s data is being managed by the application. What if this mission-critical application is down?
Legacy backup and recovery software will bring back your data, maybe a group of virtual machines but how do you know what was the application infrastructure configuration (example, a firewall rule) at the point in time that matches your data or a load balancer configuration at the time of the failure so you can bring back your application to the running state. Your RTO does not stop at the point when your data is back available, your actual RTO is to the point at which your Application is back running as healthy as it was before the disaster.
This is just an example to give you an idea of why it is important for an Application to be resilient. This blog is about the top 5 reasons why you should make sure your application is resilient.
Bad Deployments:
An application can go down if there is one line of bad code that can go and corrupt your database or your application metadata files. This is a most common scenario despite a lot of best practices followed like having an automated test suite and having a QA team organized to perform testing. Certain issues only occur in production environments with Production data that cannot be tested and found in your QA environment.
Think about the possibility of bringing back your application in the same region and in the same VNet / VPC overriding the existing corrupted deployment server, all at the touch of a button or with a single command. That is how you could ensure your application is resilient.
Think about another possibility of having a Z-Prod environment with production data and you be able to test any new changes with an on-demand creation of the QA environment with current production data.
Cloud Misconfiguration and Configuration Drifts
This is another top common scenario where there is a cloud misconfiguration, for example, a new administrator tries to implement strict security group rules by checking and removing a few unwanted inbound and outbound rules and end up in the application performing in an unexpected way.
How easy is it to find this drift and correct it manually? Now think about a system that continuously monitors and reverse engineers the system configuration changes and can go back in time to restore your cloud infrastructure configuration at a point in time. This is another way that you could achieve Application resilience.
Ransomware attacks
This is another scenario in which the business is even afraid of claiming that they are attacked by ransomware and that would affect their trust within and external to the organization. In a common case, it is rebuilding everything from scratch that is very time-consuming and has no guarantee that the new system will not be compromised.
Think about the ability to create a number of application environments, one to bring back the application as production and another to perform security testing to identify the risks. That is another parameter for confirming that your application is resilient.
Cloud Region/Cloud Service Failures
What if one of the cloud regions or one of the cloud services went down in a particular region. Though the failure seems like a rare occurrence, it is always a possible disaster scenario where the cloud infrastructure or service fails in a particular zone or a region. You could refer to the history of a bad Christmas for Netflix in 2012, Azure Storage services down in Nov 2014.
Business continuity is ensured only by making sure a highly available system outside of your cloud environment is aware of your system’s dependencies and could do application resilience.
Natural Disasters
Disaster recovery as a business gained its importance to address the Natural disasters that could possibly occur anywhere in the world. It is always important to make sure the business is resilient against Natural disasters. Any Natural disaster could have an impact on the company’s Assets, Supply Chains, Facilities, and records. With respect to public clouds, Natural disasters like floods or a hurricane can bring down the power, network and even could possibly make the datacenter unsafe to operate.
In such a case, to make sure the application can be brought back quickly and run smoothly in another region is a must-have for business continuity.
To achieve all and more you have Appranix Cloud Application Resilience which addresses all the top 5 reasons why an application can go down and ensure your Application resilience.
If you are having a coffee, just go to the marketplace, subscribe to the Appranix trial, and get your application environment protected before you complete your coffee.
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