Understanding high availability for IBM Cloudant
High availability (HA) is a core discipline in an IT infrastructure to keep your apps up and running, even after a partial or full site failure. The main purpose of high availability is to eliminate potential points of failures in an IT infrastructure.
To provide HA within a data center, all data is stored in triplicate across three separate physical servers in a cluster. You can provision accounts in multiple data centers, then use continuous data replication to provide HA across data centers. IBM® Cloudant® for IBM Cloud® data isn't automatically backed up, but supported tools are provided to handle backups. Review the Disaster recovery and backup guide to explore all HA and backup considerations to meet your application requirements.
Responsibilities
To find out more about responsibility ownership for using IBM Cloud® products between IBM and the customer, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud products.
For more information about responsibilities when you use IBM Cloudant, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloudant.
What level of availability do I need?
You can achieve high availability on different levels in your IT infrastructure and within different components of your cluster. The level of availability that works for you depends on several factors, such as your business requirements, the service level agreements (SLAs) that you have with your customers, and the resources that you want to expend.
What level of availability does IBM Cloud offer?
The level of availability that you set up for your cluster impacts your coverage on the IBM Cloud high availability service level agreement terms.
Service level objectives (SLOs) describe the design points that the IBM Cloud services are engineered to meet. IBM Cloudant is designed to achieve the following availability target.
| Availability target | Target Value |
|---|---|
| Availability % | 99.99% |
Refer to Cloud Services terms for commitments and credits that are issued for failure to meet any committed SLAs. For more information, see the IBM Cloudant Service descriptions.
Locations
For more information about service availability within regions and data centers, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.