In this post, we will show you the methods for increasing the availability of your app. Read on.
App availability is essential for upholding the desired user experience and functionality that defines your software. And if your app is taken out of action due to backend issues, previously loyal users could be put off it for good.
Because of this, you need to do all you can to increase and maintain the availability of your app. To help you with this, here are a few methods to try yourself.
Table of Contents
Make The Most Of Monitoring Tools
As much as you might plan for outages and take steps to prevent them, the reality is that no solution is completely resilient. This is why you need to harness monitoring tools to track how resources are being used and look out for issues so they can be addressed before they cause chaos.
For example, if you are using always-on Availability Groups (AGs), it is wrong to assume that these will function flawlessly without being monitored. Instead, you should keep track of the AGs that power your app so you are always attuned to how it is performing and if any problems are looming large.
Consider Scalability As Soon As Possible
When building an app, you probably have a specific use case in mind, as well as an intended number of users you expect to serve at any one time.
This is all well and good in the short term, but if your app becomes more popular and needs to support the added influx of simultaneous users, it could crumble under the strain.
Because of this, it could make sense to design your app with future usage scenarios in mind, and implement as much scalability into it early on, rather than having to bolt this on in a panic when it is overwhelmed by traffic further down the line.
Of course, that does not mean you need to over-allocate resources upfront, but rather that built-in scalability should allow for additional servers to be added to the mix without this causing performance issues, unexpected bugs or security vulnerabilities.
Plan Your Responses To App Availability Issues In Advance
We have already touched on the impossibility of building a perfectly available and functional app. So if you assume that outages will occur at some point, it makes sense to plan out how you will deal with them ahead of time.
This is all about putting processes in place to codify your response to availability dilemmas. You should know who is responsible for what aspect of the response, and which tools they will be called to use in such circumstances.
Standardizing your response will make it faster and more efficient, and will also give you a means of diagnosing the causes of downtime rather than being flummoxed when they crop up.
Preparations like these are additionally advantageous because they will help you to overcome some of the pitfalls that are usually associated with troubleshooting apps in an emergency. So rather than staff being overwhelmed, they will be empowered and ready to act effectively.
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