Chapter1.Understanding High Availability

Chapter 1. Understanding High Availability

IN THIS CHAPTER

High Availability Explained 4

How Do I Know My Server Load? 5

The High-Availability Plan: Seven Must-Haves for Building High-Availability Solutions 7

Some Truths about Web Hosting 14

Active Site Monitoring 14

The Quality of Service Guarantee 15

What Next? 15

If you are reading this book, chances are your goal is not only to build a rock-solid ColdFusion application, but also to keep that application running at full speed through active and less-than-active times. At the beginning of the Internet boom, circa 1996, the Internet consisted of hundreds of pages of information, mostly published by universities and private individuals. Although these informational Web sites were important, if one of them was down for maintenance in the middle of the day, or if a Web server was over utilized on a Friday morning, nobody lost real business because few people were doing business on the Internet.

Those days are over. Businesses, organizations, and even governments are relying more and more on Internet-related revenue-generating activities such as selling products and communicating with business partners. Consequently, CIOs and CTOs alike are demanding better performance and more reliability from their Web sites. They now expect e-commerce sites to be profitable, making it more important than ever to maintain highly available Web sites. In today's terms, downtime means thousands of dollars of lost revenue, and in some cases security and safety risks.

With the advent of broadband Internet connections and faster personal computers, consumers demand more and more from the Web sites they visit. If response times do not meet customer expectations, companies run the risk of damaging their public images. Reliance on the Internet as a tool to conduct business is increasing every day, and so is our ability to create scalable, stable environments for hosting Web sites.

Enter the concept of high availability. Because today's Web applications must be available all the time without exception, and because today's serversthough highly advancedare still mechanical devices, you must put thought and planning into a Web application's design to ensure its success. Fortunately, once you have the key pieces in place, a highly available Web application is often easier to manage than a standard Internet site.

The first few chapters of this book show how to build a highly available ColdFusion site architecture, understand Web site performance, and allow the site to expand into the future. With the release of MX, ColdFusion is now more scalable than ever and supports architecture based on the Java technology's standards. This chapter gives you an idea of how to ascertain your current level of availability from within ColdFusion, and makes suggestions for understanding and improving your Web site's uptime and strengthening its architecture.