Architectures That Stay Up - Even When Everything Else Goes Down.
We design and implement high availability architectures across cloud and on-premise environments - multi-AZ, multi-region, active-active, database clustering, and intelligent load balancing - so your systems deliver 99.9% to 99.99% uptime without heroic engineering.
For engineering leaders whose business cannot afford downtime - e-commerce, fintech, SaaS platforms, and any service where every minute of outage costs revenue and reputation.
The Problem We Solve
⚠ Your application runs in a single availability zone - one data centre issue and everything goes down.
⚠ Your database is a single primary with no failover - a hardware failure means hours of downtime and potential data loss.
⚠ You have multi-AZ setup but have never tested a zone failure - you don't actually know if failover works.
⚠ Your load balancer is a single point of failure - the thing designed to prevent outages can itself cause one.
⚠ You need 99.99% uptime for your SaaS platform but your current architecture can only deliver 99.9% at best.
⚠ Your on-premise servers have no cloud failover - a power outage or natural disaster takes your business offline entirely.
⚠ Deployments cause downtime because there is no blue-green or rolling update strategy - users hit errors during every release.
What's Included
✓ Multi-AZ architecture - distribute compute, databases, and storage across 2-3 availability zones with automatic failover
✓ Multi-region active-active - serve traffic from multiple regions simultaneously with global load balancing and data replication
✓ Multi-region active-passive - warm standby in a secondary region with automated promotion and DNS failover
✓ Database high availability - PostgreSQL with Patroni/Stolon, MySQL with InnoDB Cluster/Galera, MongoDB replica sets, Aurora Multi-AZ/Global
✓ Redis and cache HA - Redis Sentinel, Redis Cluster, ElastiCache Multi-AZ with automatic failover
✓ Kubernetes HA - multi-AZ node groups, pod disruption budgets, topology spread constraints, etcd clustering
✓ Load balancing at every layer - Global (Route 53/CloudFront/Cloud CDN), regional (ALB/NLB/GLB), and service mesh (Envoy/Istio)
✓ Hybrid on-prem + cloud HA - primary on-premise with cloud burst capacity, or primary cloud with on-prem DR site
✓ Zero-downtime deployments - blue-green, canary, and rolling updates so releases never cause user-facing errors
✓ Queue and message broker HA - RabbitMQ clustering, Kafka multi-broker with rack awareness, SQS/SNS for managed alternatives
✓ Storage HA - distributed storage with Ceph/Longhorn/EBS Multi-Attach, cross-region object storage replication
✓ Health checks and circuit breakers - application-level health probes, circuit breaker patterns, graceful degradation strategies
✓ Chaos testing for HA - validate your HA design by injecting real failures: kill zones, degrade networks, crash databases
✓ Architecture documentation - detailed diagrams showing failure domains, failover paths, RTO per component, and recovery procedures
Engagement Process
01
Availability Assessment
Audit current architecture for single points of failure. Define uptime targets (99.9%, 99.95%, 99.99%). Map failure domains and blast radius.
02
HA Architecture Design
Design target architecture with redundancy at every layer. Cost modelling for different availability tiers. Trade-off analysis for your specific workload.
03
Implementation
Deploy HA infrastructure: database clusters, multi-AZ compute, load balancers, storage replication. Zero-downtime migration from single-instance to HA.
04
Validation & Chaos Testing
Inject real failures to validate HA works: kill AZs, crash database primaries, saturate networks. Fix gaps. Document everything.
Technology Stack
PatroniStolonPgBouncerGalera ClusterInnoDB ClusterAurora Global DatabaseCloud SQL HARedis SentinelRedis ClusterKafkaRabbitMQHAProxyEnvoyIstioRoute 53CloudFrontCloud CDNCephLonghornVeleroTerraformGremlinLitmusChaos
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% uptime?
99.9% allows ~8.7 hours of downtime per year. 99.99% allows ~52 minutes per year. The architectural complexity (and cost) increases significantly at each level. We help you choose the right target based on your business impact per hour of downtime.
Do we need multi-region or is multi-AZ enough?
Multi-AZ (2-3 zones within one region) handles the vast majority of failures: individual server, rack, or data centre issues. Multi-region protects against full regional outages, which are rare but devastating. For most startups, multi-AZ is sufficient. For regulated industries or global SaaS, multi-region is essential.
How do you handle database HA without data loss?
Synchronous replication for zero data loss (at a latency cost) or asynchronous replication for minimal data loss (sub-second). Patroni for PostgreSQL, Galera for MySQL, or managed options like Aurora Multi-AZ. We design based on your RPO tolerance.
Can you make our on-premise systems highly available?
Yes. Options include: on-prem clustering (Pacemaker/Corosync), on-prem + cloud hybrid with automated failover, or full migration to cloud HA. We assess your specific constraints (compliance, latency, data sovereignty) and design accordingly.
How do you prove the HA architecture actually works?
Chaos testing. We use Gremlin or LitmusChaos to inject real failures - kill an availability zone, crash the database primary, saturate the network - and validate that your system recovers within RTO. If it does not, we fix it until it does.
Will HA double our infrastructure costs?
Not necessarily. Multi-AZ adds ~30-50% to compute and database costs. You can offset this with right-sizing, reserved instances, and spot for non-critical workloads. Multi-region is more expensive but can be optimised with active-passive (warm standby) instead of active-active.
Ready to talk high availability & resilience?
Book a free 30-minute architecture review. We'll assess your setup and give you an honest recommendation.