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High availability cluster

The way businesses engage consumers has evolved thanks to advances in SaaS and mobile. From booking flights and renting cars, to making purchases and banking - users are doing more from multiple devices and applications. This new, highly connected architecture presents new opportunities and challenges, as keeping systems and services running and connected is crucial. Not only are companies making their services available on more platforms, they must meet demands for 24/7 availability. Consumers access applications and services at all hours of the day from various platforms and in order to ensure customer satisfaction and boost revenue, businesses need their services to be available anytime the consumer summons.

High availability clustering is a method used to minimize downtime and provide continuous service when certain system components fail. HA clusters consists of multiple nodes that communicate and share information through shared data memory grids and are a great way to ensure high system availability, reliability and scalability.

 

Who needs high availability

High availability is essential for any organizations interested in protecting their business against the risk of a system outage, loss of transactional data, incomplete data, or message processing errors. These risks, in some situations, can mean millions of dollars in revenue loss. For a business interested in being available at all times, HA clustering is a practical solution. Online and mobile platforms can attract high amounts of traffic, with peak traffic doubling or even tripling during holidays and sales.  These traffic spikes require a robust solution to manage the sudden increase in transactions. Moreover, organizations in the banking, billing, e-commerce and related finance spectrum demand 24/7 systems availability with zero message loss.

Companies have looked for ways to deliver HA results, including downloading high availability software solutions, custom development solutions and even load balancers. These solutions, however, tend to come with their own set of issues. Software solutions may not always be compatible with the rest of the business enterprise, causing integration issues atop the existing HA challenges. Custom development solutions, although seemingly simple at first, tend to be rather complicated, fragile and expensive. Additionally, custom solutions are very difficult to integrate into the established business ecosystem. Finally, load balancers are tools used for socket-based inbound endpoints such as TCP or HTTP, but do not help with file-based transports such as File, FTP, or SFTP and can cause significant issues as they are unable to protect against message loss. Moreover, because they are offered as hardware or software solutions, they also pose related equipment and program challenges.

Anypoint Platform high availability

MuleSoft offers Anypoint Platform, the world’s most widely used integration platform for creating connectivity between applications on-premises and in the cloud. Not only is Anypoint Platform, which contains Mule as an ESB, architected to deliver robust integration solutions, it is designed to deliver in both high throughput and highly distributed environments.

MuleSoft's market-leading Anypoint Platform is trusted by over 1,600 customers in 60 countries for ultra high-performance use cases and mission-critical applications. Anypoint Platform's high availability clustering is structured in an active-active model that ensures that no single server functions as the primary server, enabling all servers within the cluster are able to take over when another node fails. This load balancing structure allows Anypoint Platform to offer a number of advantages to businesses:

  • Guaranteed reliability: Sharing workloads between applications and information with Anypoint Platform's in-memory data grid offer reliability and ensure automatic failover.
  • High performance: With Anypoint Platform's edge caching technology, businesses can take on the most high performance and mission critical applications. Even more, Anypoint Platform can deliver more transaction on the same amount of hardware (or less) that competitors, significantly reducing costs.
  • Scalability: Anypoint Platform’s highly scalable SEDA architecture allows for infinite scalability horizontally or vertically. With dynamic scalability, applications can scale up or out whenever the size of a cluster varies.

Anypoint Platform and its active-active high availability clustering model enables businesses have 100% uptime for the most critical and high performance applications. Organizations can employ Mule as an ESB for their integration architecture needs, all the while ensuring zero message loss, robust failover management, unmatched reliability, impressive performance and infinite scalability. To learn how Anypoint Platform can benefit your organization with high availability and application integration, contact an expert today.