High availability: defining the terms

It is quite common to see a lot of places talking about availability, how to make your website, program, web service, etc, 24x7.

Even here I talked few times about this subject, but what I miss is some papers discussing the meanings of the terms in this area. A kind of a common language that we can talk about, I know that it depends a lot of your environment, company, software and so on. So in this post I would like to put some light in this subject.

Last month IBM release one of their famous Redbooks (I remember a time that an IBM Redbook was a kind of: "OHHHH really do you have one!, but those times are over with the floppy disks): High Availability in WebSphere Messaging Solutions.

No, I am not doing advertisement about the IBM products, it has an excellent part about concepts, so it really worths reading the Chapter1. Introduction to Availability and Chapter2. Application Design for Availability.

There is a lot of concepts and therms definition that will help you a lot, doesn't matter if you are implementing something in your own software, designing an application, for general knowledge. For me it is a must read for developers, architects, software development support team and so on.

Hope you enjoy the tip!