Disaster Recovery and High Availability for OutSystems Platform servers

High Availability vs Disaster Recovery

To understand the difference in each approach, mind the following:

• High Availability - is a system that is expected to be continuously delivering for a long time. Availability can be measured relative to "100% operational" or "never failing". A widely-held but difficult-to-achieve standard of availability for a system or product is known as "five 9s" (99.999 percent) availability.
• Disaster Recovery - defines a set of policies and procedures to assure the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems, following a natural or human-induced disaster.

These setups can live together but they require different planning and different implementations.

High Availability

High Availability is all about uptime when facing hazardous events. The goal is to create a redundancy in your infrastructure that can respond to events, through horizontal scalability, preventing them from impacting your business. Depending on your configuration, it can respond to events at a server level, an entire datacenter or even in geographical areas. Is your business risk level and customer landscape that will determine to what point OutSystems has to scale, but we present the following examples to show typical scenarios that can be put in place.

Example 1 - Localized High Availability Design

This design example prevents localized system events. By having redundancy you are able to balance your load to respond to any existing events.

Example 2 - Geographic High Availability Design

This design example prevents geographic system events. By having redundancy both at the datacenter level and within the datacenter you can cope with geographical system events:

Disaster Recovery

A disaster recovery happens after you had any kind of disaster. Here you are defining how fast can you recover from that disaster and what is the amount of information you are willing to lose in it. To help you creating the right decision there are two important concepts to keep in mind:

• Recovery point objective (RPO) - is defined by business continuity planning. It is the maximum targeted period in which data might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident.
• Recovery time objective (RTO) - is the targeted time frame and service level within a business process that it must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.

Optimally, the more critical is your business process the less RPO vs RTO is to be aimed. This is achieved through a conjunction of an High Availability design and a set of policies and procedures contained in a Disaster Recovery Plan.

To help you achieving success, whether there’s an existing business continuity plan or a new one is to be aligned, we share a very simple disaster recovery plan for an OutSystems Infrastructure.

More Information

To learn more about how to set up your OutSystems Platform check the Designing OutSystems infrastructures guide.