Client asks for 100% uptime

Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by illumin8 on Friday September 30, 2011 @08:51AM (#3056741)

Look at F5 networks Global Traffic Manager. It's really just a fancy DNS server. You set your TTL (time to live) down to just a few seconds and it monitors your main and standby sites. If one of the sites goes down it changes your A records to point to the new site. It can even do load balancing across sites based on response time or number of connections.

They are expensive, but this is how large companies like Yahoo keep close to 100% uptime.

Explain to the customer that even with a hot site, the failover can take a few minutes. Also, some ISPs don't honor TTL and cache DNS queries for longer than they should. The Internet isn't perfect, and usually each extra 9 you add is around 4x more cost.

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by sambeau on Friday September 30, 2011 @09:02AM (#3056773)

Alternatively look at Zeus's Traffic Manager and Global Load Balancer.

http://www.zeus.com/products/traffic-manager

http://www.zeus.com/products/global-load-balancer

These are smart, easy to use and well supported. They're also to be found inside big cloud offerings like AWS and Joyent.

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by marquis on Friday September 30, 2011 @08:59AM (#3056758)

This is the kind of service I'd love to attack as a side project, it's fascinating. Though I'm sure someone out there reading this, has something like this service but affordable for startups?

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by illumin8 on Friday September 30, 2011 @09:39AM (#3056922)

There is a lot of room in this market for competition from open source projects. Really, the concept is so simple that it could be done with a shell script for simple failover:

(pseudo code) if (curl http://ip of main site) fails then copy alternate zone file to bind dir service named reload fi

You get the idea... F5 Networks is really just a fancy DNS server running on a BSD based OS on an x86 appliance. Zeus, which another commentor mentioned, has an AWS version and will let you run it on your own hardware if you like.

I'd love to see some open source competition for this space, or even low price competition.

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by marquis on Saturday October 01, 2011 @06:02PM (#3061254)

>I'd love to see some open source competition for this space, or even low price competition.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Running our own failover system is not just expensive, but time-consuming - just another thing to do when you are trying to scale and time is already short within a small team.

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by twstdroot on Friday September 30, 2011 @10:37AM (#3057154)

Several DNS hosting services do this at varying costs. DurableDNS (which I founded but have sold) does it at a low cost. It's fairly trivial softwarewise as long as you have the redundant hardware, DCs, etc.

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Re:Client asks for 100% uptime by iqster on Friday September 30, 2011 @05:38PM (#3058666)

I have a very naive question but would appreciate an answer.

Does using Amazon's CloudFront provide the same functionality if you live inside their cloud?

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