3 Strategies for Minimizing Downtime

Introduction

As businesses and other organizations increasingly depend on internet-based services, developers and sysadmins are focusing their attention on creating reliable infrastructure that minimizes costly downtime.

A website, API, or other service being unavailable can have significant monetary costs resulting from lost sales. Additionally, downtime can lead to:

• Unhappy Customers and Users: Users expect stable services. Interruptions can lead to increased support requests and a general loss of confidence in your brand.
• Lost Productivity: If your employees depend on a service to do their jobs, downtime means lost productivity for your organization. Also, if your employees are spending their time rebooting servers and fighting downtime, they’re not developing new features and products.
• Unhappy Employees: Frequent downtime alerts can lead to alert fatigue, and constantly scrambling to solve problems can take a toll on your team and their morale.

The modern field that has coalesced to address these issues is called Site Reliability Engineering or SRE. SRE was created at Google starting in 2003, and the strategies they developed were gathered into a book titled Site Reliability Engineering. Reading up on this field is a good way to explore techniques and best practices for minimizing downtime.

In this article, we will discuss three areas where improvements could lead to less downtime for your organization. These areas are monitoring and alerting, software deployments, and high availability.

This is not an exhaustive list of strategies, but is intended to point you toward some common solutions you should consider when improving the production readiness of your services.