Every website or application needs to be concerned about its availability, some more than others. The nature of an application, its number of users, and the uptime both an organization and its users expect are a few of the factors that shape a website’s availability needs. Financial websites and applications, in particular, must make high availability a major priority, but non-financial sites and applications may be hit just as hard by unacceptable downtime.

“Acceptable downtime” and “acceptable loss” are defined as the RTO and RPO, respectively. Altering these values can dramatically affect the nature and cost of a highly available architecture, and this is perfectly reasonable. A bank with hundreds of thousands of customers is both better equipped and more motivated to ensure that its customer-facing web applications are more available than a hobbyist selling five or six collectable sports cards per week.

Choose a non-financial website/application that you think would benefit from being highly available. Then, assume that the company that manages the site/application has contracted with you to design a highly available system.

Post a response that:

Describes the website or application you have chosen, and include a link, if available

Describes an appropriate availability architecture that would address the needs of the website or application, including appropriate RTO and RPO estimates

Explains why the architecture you chose will recover quickly enough to meet the suggested RTO

Explains why the architecture will reduce data loss to satisfy the RPO