Module Title: dgt_sre08 – High Availability
Description:
“dgt_sre08 – High Availability” is a module for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) who want to improve the resilience and reliability of cluster-based systems. It covers the main aspects of high availability and how to build systems that keep delivering service when failures occur.
The practice follows the Academy’s natural-language method. After studying quorum, fencing and failover, you describe the cluster you want to the machine (“three nodes, one virtual IP, fencing enabled, the service must survive the loss of any single node”), let it build it, and then break it on purpose: you ask it to cut a node off the network and check that quorum, fencing and failover behave exactly as the theory predicts.
Key Learning Objectives:
- Understanding High Availability:
- Explore what it means for a system to be highly available, focusing on cluster-based architectures.
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Learn about the metrics and benchmarks used to measure availability and how they apply to real-world scenarios.
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Quorum and Fencing Concepts:
- Understand quorum in distributed systems, including its role in ensuring consistency and reliability.
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Study the fencing mechanisms that prevent split-brain scenarios and preserve data integrity during failures.
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Resilience to Faults:
- Study strategies for designing systems that are resilient to various types of faults, from hardware malfunctions to network partitions.
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Learn how failover and redundancy minimize downtime and maintain service continuity, and how to specify them so the machine implements them correctly.
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Service Continuity:
- Explore best practices for maintaining uninterrupted service delivery, even when parts of the system fail.
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Investigate monitoring and alerting systems that help detect issues early and automate recovery processes.
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Natural-Language Practice:
- Work through exercises and case studies in which you instruct the machine to apply the theory to real-world scenarios, and you judge the result.
- Direct the machine in using the tools commonly employed by SREs to design, implement, and test high availability solutions, verifying its configurations and the outcome of every failure test.
By the end of this module, participants will have a solid understanding of the principles and practices that underpin high availability. They will be able to design systems that meet defined reliability requirements, and to guide and verify the machine as it builds them, so that the service continues to be delivered when components fail. The module is intended both for people new to the field and for those with prior experience in building fault-tolerant systems.
Who Should Attend:
– Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)
– System Administrators
– DevOps Professionals
– IT Managers and Architects interested in enhancing system reliability
The students can push their exercises to the Academy DevOps & SRE Git project. For this module, create a folder with your username as its name in the following subfolder: https://github.com/Garanti-Del-Talento/gdt_academy