High Availability and Performance for Enterprise Application on Compute Engine

Maximizing Performance and Minimizing Downtime: Best Practices for High Availability on Google Cloud

Question

Your company has an enterprise application running on Compute Engine that requires high availability and high performance.

The application has been deployed on two instances in two zones in the same region in active-passive mode.

The application writes data to a persistent disk.

In the case of a single zone outage, that data should be immediately made available to the other instance in the other zone.

You want to maximize performance while minimizing downtime and data loss.

What should you do?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

B.

This scenario requires high availability and high performance for an enterprise application running on Compute Engine that writes data to a persistent disk. To ensure that data is immediately available in case of a single zone outage, the application is deployed in two instances in two zones in the same region in active-passive mode. The goal is to maximize performance while minimizing downtime and data loss.

Let's look at each answer option and evaluate them:

A. The first option is to attach a persistent SSD disk to the first instance and create a snapshot every hour. In case of a zone outage, the persistent SSD disk can be recreated in the second instance from the created snapshot. However, this approach can result in data loss as data written within the last hour may not be included in the snapshot. Additionally, recreating the disk from the snapshot can take time and result in downtime. This option is not the best approach for this scenario.

B. The second option is to create a Cloud Storage bucket and mount it into the first instance with gcs-fuse. In case of a zone outage, the Cloud Storage bucket can be mounted to the second instance with gcs-fuse. This approach can ensure high availability and reduce downtime. However, using Cloud Storage can result in higher latency and lower performance compared to using local disks.

C. The third option is to attach a regional SSD persistent disk to the first instance. In case of a zone outage, the disk can be force-attached to the other instance. This approach can ensure high availability and performance. However, forcing the attachment of the disk to the other instance can take time and result in downtime.

D. The fourth option is to attach a local SSD to the first instance disk and execute an rsync command every hour, where the target is a persistent SSD disk attached to the second instance. In case of a zone outage, the second instance can be used. This approach can ensure high performance and reduce data loss as data is copied every hour. However, this approach can result in higher complexity as rsync needs to be properly configured, and data synchronization can result in high network traffic.

Considering all options, the best approach for this scenario is option C, which is to attach a regional SSD persistent disk to the first instance. This approach can ensure high availability and performance, and it does not require additional configuration or synchronization processes. However, it is important to ensure that the disk is properly configured for high availability by creating a regional persistent disk and enabling regional replication. This can ensure that data is immediately available in case of a single zone outage without downtime or data loss.