By Trilio Content Team | June 2, 2022
If you run containerized applications in production, you know how critical it is to avoid downtime. After all, your customers depend on those apps and so do your reputation, SLAs, and revenue. That’s why it’s so important to focus on application resiliency from the start. The more resilient they are, the easier and faster it is to bounce back when outages inevitably occur.
But what is application resiliency really and why does it matter? Let’s break it down.
What is Application Resiliency?
Simply put, application resiliency is how quickly you can rebound from outages of all kinds, from human error and ransomware attacks to natural disasters. The cause of the downtime isn’t as important as what happens after and how fast you can get back up and running.
Application resiliency is a critical part of your business continuity plan and is even more important now that infrastructures are increasingly diverse and complex.
For example, if you use multiple clouds, a resilient infrastructure gives you the flexibility to restore your data from one cloud to another or move between distributions quickly. That agility is critical to resiliency because it can speed up your recovery time.
Therefore, resilient applications can:
- Run successfully in production without errors
- Shift to different environments or infrastructures if and when they need to
- Be recovered or restored into another cloud quickly and efficiently
Why Does Resiliency Matter?
When your applications are resilient, they can bounce back quickly from unexpected downtime. And that means good things for your business, including:
- Your customers: Your customers get the best possible experience with your applications with minimal service delays.
- Your reputation: Your brand will be seen as trusted and reliable — and avoid negative media attention.
- Your revenue: Protect your revenue by keeping your customers happy and new ones interested in purchasing.
- Your people: Resilient infrastructure maximizes employee productivity by keeping applications available and performing even during outages.
How is Application Resiliency Measured?
True application resiliency depends on one big thing: time to recover. And that involves two specific time metrics — recovery time objective (RTO) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
RTO is a goal around the minimum time your applications can be down before business interruptions take place, whereas MTTR is the actual time it takes you to recover during an outage.
Together, these metrics can help you determine how resilient your applications are and how resilient you need them to be.
Want to learn more about the metrics that matter for resiliency? Download our eBook: The Key Benchmarks for Realizing Application Resiliency
How to Improve Your Application Resiliency
Now that you know what application resiliency is, why it matters, and how to measure it, you might be wondering how to make your applications resilient and improve your recovery time metrics. A good first step? Start with your backup or data protection solution.
Here’s what to look for:
- Application-centric backup: Your platform should back up both data and metadata. Metadata includes important context for how your application is constructed and helps you efficiently get back to your last known good state.
- Continuous backup for fast restoration: Your platform should be continuously backing up your data and metadata so when disaster hits, restoration is fast and minimizes data loss.
- Ability to backup to any cloud or any Kubernetes distribution: Find a solution that allows you to send point-in-time copies to multiple environments, so you can migrate applications and maximize the cost and performance of your environment.
- Disaster recovery automation: Look for a tool that lets you create your own disaster recovery plans, including backing up and restoring across clouds or distributions or in multiple namespaces. These workflows help you implement best practices and meet your compliance objectives.
Can your data protection platform do that?
If it can’t, now’s the time to make a switch! TrilioVault for Kubernetes can boost your application resiliency with ease. In fact, you can see up to an 80% improvement in recovery time. Chat with one of our K8s experts today to see it in action.
And remember to get your free eBook on key benchmarks for application resiliency to find out how resilient your apps really are and what you can do to make them even better.
