What Is High Availability? How It Works and How Many Nines You Actually Need
High availability (HA) is a system’s ability to keep serving users when individual components fail, from a single server up to a whole cloud region or provider. It is measured in nines: 99.9% allows about 8 hours 46 minutes of downtime a year, 99.99% about 52 minutes, and 99.999% about 5 minutes 15 seconds. HA works by removing single points of failure through redundancy, health checks, automatic failover, and replicated data.