Failure management
Failures are a given and everything will eventually fail over time: from routers to hard
disks, from operating systems to memory units corrupting TCP packets, from transient errors to
permanent failures. This is a given, whether you are using the highest-quality hardware or
lowest cost components - Werner Vogels, CTO - Amazon.com
Low-level hardware component failures are something to be dealt with every day in in an on-premises data center. In the cloud, however, you should be protected against most of these types of failures. For example, Amazon EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone where they are automatically replicated to protect you from the failure of a single component. All EBS volumes are designed for 99.999% availability. Amazon S3 objects are stored across a minimum of three Availability Zones providing 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. Regardless of your cloud provider, there is the potential for failures to impact your workload. Therefore, you must take steps to implement resiliency if you need your workload to be reliable.
A prerequisite to applying the best practices discussed here is that you must ensure that the people designing, implementing, and operating your workloads are aware of business objectives and the reliability goals to achieve these. These people must be aware of and trained for these reliability requirements.
The following sections explain the best practices for managing failures to prevent impact on your workload.
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