With business running around the clock, customers and staff expect uninterrupted access to key software applications, making uptime essential to deliver optimum user experience. By implementing strategies aimed at keeping applications online, operational and responsive, companies can enhance their profitability, profile and overall competitiveness in the marketplace.

We interviewed our experts Luqman Saeed, Fabio Turizo and Patrik Duditš to help you with a few key tips on how to develop applications with high availability, consistency and reliability.

Note: Part of this article appeared on InformationWeek.

Maximizing availability is crucial for any software application to deliver uninterrupted operations, maintain customer satisfaction and maximize revenue opportunities. 98% of companies experienced costs exceeding $100K per hour due to application downtime. Additionally, one out of every six outages resulting in costs exceeding $1 million. These expenses are associated solely to productivity and data loss costs. An additional $239k in losses can be attributed to reputation damage and churn. Therefore, maximizing uptime plays a key role in determining the success of a business.

Designing out downtime

High application availability should be considered from the early design phase, in line with Quality by Design (QbD) principles. Subject matter experts (SMEs) should define the key features and capabilities that should be included as well as suitable downtime mitigation strategies. During this stage, it is extremely important to consider the business requirements that the application needs to address as well as the operational conditions.

For example, it is important to pay attention to the architecture, e.g. considering what works best for the intended industry and typical use case. This architectural knowledge is generally gained through years of experience. Therefore, developers should work closely with architecture specialists and SMEs with extensive know-how on the topic to identify the most effective solution.

In addition, defining typical operational conditions is crucial. In particular, considering what average and peak demand will look like is essential to determine what resources are needed, limiting both under- and over-specifying, which ultimately influence expenses and return on investment (ROI). If average and peak demand vary considerably, it becomes crucial for applications to be able to scale to maximize availability. In these instances, strategies for horizontal and vertical scaling should be considered to handle varying loads efficiently.

Effective development and testing

When it comes to the actual development of a web application, a collaborative approach that engages developers, infrastructure specialists and architects can help to maximize the robustness and overall capabilities of the end product. This approach is essential to avoid developing applications in a bubble that cannot account for real-world conditions and business requirements.

Favoring simple coding is also extremely beneficial, as it helps SMEs to quickly identify any potential issue, as well as easily resolve bugs that can compromise uptime. When programming, it is also useful to reduce dependency on third party libraries, which should be up-to-date. In effect, applications that rely on multiple dependencies can be subject to frequent downtime as well as time- and resource-intensive troubleshooting.

Once the application is ready, rigorous testing and quality assurance (QA) are a must. Carrying out thorough load testing, stress testing and chaos engineering helps ensure the application can handle real-world conditions and unexpected failures, contributing to higher availability and uptime.

Expecting the unexpected

SMEs should also make sure their applications utilize updated runtimes that can address their needs. In particular, as downtime can never be fully eliminated and any system will eventually fail, it is important to set up effective measures to quickly resolve any issue and promptly re-establish application availability. Implementing monitoring and performance management tools that help to identify failure and resolve it are a must.

The adoption and implementation of such features should also be carefully considered. Often, the hosting status page is found on the same infrastructure as the application. As a result, if something fails, resolving the issue becomes virtually impossible, as there is no place for the updates.
In addition, as not every call will succeed, making sure that applications are ready to support these instances is fundamental. To do this, SMEs should write clients including retry strategies that do not overwhelm the system in case of failure.

Setting up a disaster recovery plan is also a must, as it can help handle catastrophic failures. This plan should include regular backups, failover systems and redundancy to ensure data integrity and quick recovery.

Conclusions

In a world where business never sleeps, ensuring continuous access to critical software applications is paramount. By designing for high availability from the start, adopting collaborative development practices and preparing for inevitable failures, companies can create robust applications that meet even the strictest demands from users. These strategies improve uptime and user experience, ultimately enhancing profitability and competitive advantage, all factors that drive success in the digital marketplace.