4
Availability
Technology does not always rhyme with perfection and reliability. Far from it in reality!
—Jean-Michel Jarre
Availability refers to a property of software—namely, that it is there and ready to carry out its task when you need it to be. This is a broad perspective and encompasses what is normally called reliability (although it may encompass additional considerations such as downtime due to periodic maintenance). Availability builds on the concept of reliability by adding the notion of recovery—that is, when the system breaks, it repairs itself. Repair may be accomplished by various means, as we’ll see in this chapter.
Availability also encompasses the ability of a system to mask or repair faults such that they do not become failures, ...
Get Software Architecture in Practice, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
