High availability overview
Ensuring high availability (HA) is important for all cloud-based applications, and it is all the more critical for regulated workloads that the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is intended to host. In short, consumers depend on your application and cannot afford downtime. Using the VPC reference architecture and following the controls of the IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services help you achieve that goal. When building an HA solution in IBM Cloud, you need to consider your workloads that run in virtual servers or Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and the HA characteristics of all of the other IBM Cloud services your solution depends on.
HA for the reference architectures
See the following resources depending on which reference architecture you are using:
HA in IBM Cloud services
Your HA strategy needs to consider all of the IBM Cloud services in your deployment. The following table provides references to additional information on HA for each service in the reference architecture.
| Category | VPC reference architecture | Satellite reference architecture | Optional for both |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | |||
| Containers | |||
| Networking | |||
| Storage | |||
| Security | |||
| Logging and monitoring | |||
| Integration |
The references cover the steps that the service has taken to achieve high availability as well as the steps you must take. For example, consider Direct Link. The Direct Link service itself makes use of multiple zones within a region to help achieve HA. However, you Direct Link is not a redundant service at the cross-connect router (XCR), so you have the responsibility for creating redundancy through your border gateway protocol (BGP) schemas. See High availability and disaster recovery for Direct Link and Models for diversity and redundancy in Direct Link for more details.
In addition to the Financial Services Validated services in the reference architecture, see the following references for other important information:
Related controls in IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services
The following IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services controls are most related to this guidance. However, in addition to following the guidance here, ydo your own due diligence to ensure you meet the requirements.
| Family | Control |
|---|---|
| Contingency Planning (CP) | CP-2 Contingency Plan CP-7 Alternate Processing Site |
| System and Communications Protection (SC) | SC-6 Resource Availability |