Understanding high availability

I’m not going to state Murphy’s Law a third time, but understand that it applies here as well. Things will go wrong and they will fall apart. Never forget that. One of the reasons DevOps as a concept and culture became so popular was that its techniques delivered a highly available product with very little downtime, maintenance time, and vulnerability to app-breaking errors.

One of the reasons DevOps succeeds in its mission for high availability is the ability to understand failure, react to failure, and recover from failure. Here’s a famous quote from Werner Vogel, the CTO of Amazon:

Everything fails, all the time.

This is, in fact, the foundation of the best practice guides, tutorials, and documentation that AWS makes for DevOps operations, and it’s true. Sometimes, things fail because of a mistake that has been made. Sometimes, they fail because of circumstances that are completely out of our control, and sometimes...