‘Always On’ is a hallmark of digital transformation. Digital businesses never sleep. Mobile apps, websites, IoT systems, social media, telcos, and financial services are operating 24 by 7. Hour-long maintenance windows are a thing of the past.
Whereas outages used to cost money because of missed transactions, today they cost customers. Credit cards that are rejected because the service is not available move to the back of the wallet; payment gateways that are offline for more than a few seconds get replaced by vendors with better availability; content that doesn’t load instantaneously all the time is soon forgotten; security systems that cannot generate access keys are unacceptable.
Databases are foundational for all of these services. Their ‘Always On’ mojo, also known as High availability (HA), is constrained by what the database can support. If the database can only achieve 99.99% availability, then the whole solution cannot exceed that service level.
This whitepaper takes the reader through a discussion of what it means to be ‘Always On’, what the obstacles are, and how EDB Postgres Distributed creates a Postgres®-based alternative to proprietary solutions, such as Oracle® Real Application Cluster (RAC). We end with a discussion of the business case for Postgres Distributed.