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AWS Releases Tool To Monitor and Maintain High-Availability Apps
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week launched a new tool for customers whose applications need to meet availability requirements higher than "four nines."
The Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller became generally available on Tuesday. Customers can deploy the tool via AWS CloudFormation using the templates here.
In a blog post, AWS developer evangelist Sébastien Stormacq described the Route 53 Application Recovery Controller as a "set of capabilities" within the broader Amazon Route 53 product "that continuously monitors an application's ability to recover from failures and controls application recovery across multiple AWS Availability Zones, AWS Regions, and on premises environments."
The Route 53 Application Recovery Controller is designed specifically for workloads that require exceptionally high availability, including those involved in stock trading or real-time payment processing. Such applications need "availability rate[s] at or above 99.99% with recovery time objectives (RTO) measured in seconds or minutes," Stormacq said.
"To address these requirements, you typically deploy multiple replicas across a variety of AWS Availability Zones, AWS Regions, and on premises environments," he added. "Then, you use Amazon Route 53 to reliably route end users to the appropriate replica."
The Route 53 Application Recovery Controller adds a level of automation to these steps, mainly via two features: readiness checks and routing controls.
The readiness checks let customers assess the ability of their application to perform a recovery by monitoring "AWS resource configurations, capacity, and network routing policies." Routing controls, meanwhile, redirect traffic to ensure application availability.
Pricing for the Route 53 Application Recovery Controller is determined on an on-demand basis. "You are charged per readiness check and per cluster per hour," Stormacq said. "Readiness checks are charged $0.045 / hour. Cluster are charged $2.5 / hour."
More information is available here.