Introduction to high availability

In order to understand our goals for this chapter, we first need to talk about the more general terms of high availability and scalability. Let's look at each individually to understand how the pieces work together.

We'll discuss the required terminology and begin to understand the building blocks that we'll use to conceptualize, construct, and run a Kubernetes cluster in the cloud.

Let's dig into high availability, uptime, and downtime.

How do we measure availability?

High availability (HA) is the idea that your application is available, meaning reachable, to your end users. In order to create highly available applications, your application code and the frontend that users interact with needs to be available the majority of the time. This term comes from the system design field, which defines the architecture, interface, data, and modules of a system in order to satisfy a given set of requirements. There are many examples of system design in disciplines from...