Is your critical application guaranteed to stay online? Discover our 7 tips!

Take a moment to think about the applications within your organisation:

• Is your ERP system, quotation tool, planning tool or accounting software crucial to the operation of your organisation?
• Does your organisation experience a financial impact when the E-commerce environment or your mobile app is down?

In such a case, we refer to it as a "critical" application.
Without these applications, (part of) your organisation can no longer function, costing you time, money and sometimes even your reputation with your customers!

Here are 7 tips to help you use your critical applications smoothly at all times: 
We are happy to explain them in more detail in the article below.

1. Monitoring
2. Scalability
3. Redundancy
4. Backups
5. Security
6. Automation
7. Testing

1. Implement a solid monitoring strategy

Make sure you have a robust monitoring system that continuously monitors your application's performance, availability and errors. This enables you to identify and resolve problems quickly before they become critical.

Here are several different forms of monitoring:

• Performance monitoring enables you to monitor the load, response times and other important parameters of your environment. You can track metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, network throughput and database performance. By analysing this data, you can identify bottlenecks and proactively implement optimisations to improve your application's performance.
• Availability monitoring (availability/uptime monitoring) involves checking whether your application is online and accessible to users. You usually use uptime monitoring tools that periodically send a request to your application to check whether it responds. If an outage occurs, you receive an immediate notification, allowing you to take swift action to bring the application back online.
• Error monitoring in your application is crucial for identifying potential problems before they have major or critical consequences. For example, you can analyse error logs and reports to see which errors occur and how frequently. Based on this data, you can detect bugs and prioritise resolving them.

By implementing a monitoring system, you gain real-time insight into the health and performance of your application. This allows you to respond proactively to potential problems, optimise performance and minimise downtime. Identifying trends in the application and anticipating future requirements also becomes much easier. Simply put: robust monitoring is indispensable!

2. Plan for scalability

Make sure your application can handle a growing number of users and an increased workload.

• Design your applications with scalability in mind: When designing your application, it is important to take into account the hopefully future growth in users and the increasing load on your application. Consider the architecture and choice of technologies that enable scalability. Use modular and distributed systems that can be expanded easily.
• A commonly used option is “horizontal scaling”, where you distribute the workload across multiple (virtual) servers or containers. This can be achieved, for example, by using load balancers that distribute incoming traffic across multiple server instances. This allows you to distribute the load more effectively and increase your capacity as the number of users grows.
• Of course, you can logically also scale vertically. Our latest TurboStack flavors can go a long way in this regard, keeping your setup simple and flexible. Sometimes that is exactly what you are looking for, as no redesign of your application is required.
• Autoscaling: Cloud providers often offer services that enable automatic scaling, such as AWS Auto Scaling. Hosted Power can assist you with this. These services automatically adjust your application's capacity based on demand. For example, they can add new server instances during peak loads and reduce them when demand decreases. This ensures that your application performs consistently, regardless of the load.
• It is better to look at your databases from a different perspective. Use scalable database systems, such as relational databases with replication or distributed NoSQL databases, to increase the processing capacity of your data as your user base grows.

By incorporating scalability into your application's design, you improve the performance and availability of your applications, even with a growing user base.

3. Build mechanisms into your application to handle and recover from errors.

Consider implementing failover, redundancy and load balancing to ensure that your application keeps running, even when components fail.

• Failover refers to automatically switching to a redundant system or component when an outage occurs. This could involve automatically switching to a backup server when the primary environment fails. By implementing failover, you minimise the impact of outages and ensure that your application becomes available again quickly. If you work with a partner, the SLA (service level agreement, this agreement defines the level of “service” you may expect) also helps determine how long the impact of a potential outage may be felt.
• Redundancy involves having duplicate components or systems ready to take over (almost) live in the event of an outage. This could mean having multiple servers, network connections or databases operating in parallel. If a component fails, a redundant component can take over its tasks, ensuring that your application continues to operate.
• Load balancing distributes incoming traffic, or the “load”, evenly across multiple servers or systems. This helps prevent individual components from becoming overloaded and ensures efficient use of available resources. If a server fails, the load balancing mechanism can redirect the flow of traffic to other servers, keeping your application available online.

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4. Make sure your backups are in order

Make sure you take regular backups so that you can restore to a very recent point in time (RPO , recovery point objective) and keep your recovery time as short as possible (RTO , recovery time objective). Regularly test whether your backup is consistent and can be restored. This minimises the risk of data loss and enables faster recovery in the event of an outage.

• Develop a robust backup strategy that suits the nature of your application and the data you want to protect. This involves determining the frequency of backups, identifying critical data that must be included and choosing suitable backup methods.
• It is best practice to store your backups at an offsite location. This provides additional protection against physical damage to your servers and data storage, right up to the datacentre level. Even better is to also create independent snapshots to a third remote location. 
• In addition to creating backups, it is important to regularly test the recovery process. Test whether you are actually able to restore the backups and use them to recover your application. You need to be sure that your backups are consistent and usable when needed.
• Implement different backup layers, such as incremental or differential backups, in addition to your full backups. This shortens the recovery time when only modified or recent data needs to be restored.

5. Security, of course

Protect your application against attacks by implementing security measures , such as using firewalls, applying security patches and regularly conducting penetration tests. Security vulnerabilities can lead to downtime or the compromise of user data.

• A firewall acts as a barrier between your application servers and the external network, usually the internet, controlling and filtering traffic based on predefined rules. This helps prevent unauthorised access and reduces the risk of malicious attacks.
• Keep your application up to date by regularly applying security patches . Security patches are released to fix vulnerabilities and security flaws in software. It is not only your own application that may contain vulnerabilities, but also the Linux or Windows distribution on which your application runs, the database software, web server and more.
• Implement strong authentication to ensure that only authorised users have access to your environment. Use complex passwords, two-factor authentication (2FA) and restrict access to sensitive parts of your application based on user roles and permissions.
• Encrypt sensitive data, both "at rest" and in transit, to ensure that it cannot be intercepted or read by unauthorised individuals. Consider protocols such as SSL/TLS to secure data during transfer and storage.
• Awareness! Make sure your development team and employees are sufficiently trained in security. This reduces the risk of human error. Encourage a culture of awareness within your organisation.

6. Automate your deployment processes

Use automated deployment tools and processes to enable the smooth and consistent implementation of your application. This minimises the risk of human error and ensures the rapid rollout of updates and bug fixes.

• Continuous Integration (CI) provides code integration and runs build and test processes when developers make changes to the code. CI helps identify potential integration issues and perform quality control before the code is deployed to the production environment. Github, Bitbucket and Gitlab can provide support here.
• Continuous Delivery (CD) or Continuous Deployment is achieved by providing a "pipeline" that automatically and seamlessly rolls out updates and bug fixes to your production environment. Continuous deployment minimises manual errors and logically accelerates your deployment processes.
• Use automation tools for your infrastructure, such as Ansible, Puppet or Terraform , to automate the implementation of your environment. Tasks such as automatically setting up servers or containers, configuring network settings and installing software dependencies can thus be guaranteed easily, consistently and reliably.
• Container technologies such as Docker or ContainerD can help package your applications and their dependencies in isolated and portable containers. Containers make it easier to deploy applications consistently across different environments and reduce compatibility issues between development, staging and production infrastructure. Container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes take this a step further by helping automate, manage and deploy your container-based applications. You can find more information here about containers and here about Managed Kubernetes bij Hosted Power!

7. Provide a test environment

Create a separate test environment that is as close as possible to the production environment. Here, you can test changes and updates before implementing them in production, reducing the risk of unforeseen problems.

• “As close as possible to the production environment” includes replicating the infrastructure, network configurations, software stacks, such as our TurboStack, and other relevant elements. The closer the match between the test and production environments, the more reliable the results.
• Run both functional tests and performance tests in the test environment. Functional tests focus on validating the application's intended functionality. Performance tests, in turn, evaluate response and stability characteristics under a given load. Identify bugs, errors and performance issues before they affect the live environment.
• Make sure you have proper version control in place so that you can track and manage changes and updates in the test environment.
• If you encounter problems or errors during testing, make sure you have an effective process for troubleshooting and debugging. This includes recording and analysing errors, keeping logs and collecting other relevant diagnostic information.

Bonus: Document your application thoroughly

... including its architecture, configuration and any dependencies. This facilitates maintenance and troubleshooting, especially when changes are made or new team members join.

Know that you can turn to Hosted Power for all the matters mentioned above, and rightly so. We take care of your application-related concerns and provide advice tailored to your applications.

"We are committed to working with your developers and colleagues to match the most relevant technologies to your organisation's needs, keeping your critical application online!"

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