High-availability platforms

Azure has introduced a lot of new features in recent times with regard to high availability for PaaS. One of them is related to containers and the ecosystem surrounding them. Azure has introduced the following services:

• Containers in app services
• Azure container instance groups
• Azure Kubernetes services
• Other container orchestrators, such as DC/OS and Swarm

The other important platform that brings high availability is Service Fabric. Both Service Fabric and container orchestrators that include Kubernetes ensure that a desired number of application instances are always up and running in an environment. What this means is that even if one of the instances goes down in the environment, the orchestrator will know about it by means of active monitoring and will spin up a new instance on a different node, thereby maintaining the ideal and desired number of instances. It does this without any manual or automated interference from the administrator.

While Service Fabric allows any type of application to become highly available, orchestrators such as Kubernetes, DC/OS, and Swarm are specific to containers. Also, it is important to understand that these platforms provide features that help in rolling updates, rather than a big bank update that might effect the availability of the application.