In the 1990s I spent a few years studying requirements on
databases used in 3G telecom networks. The main requirement was
centered around three keywords, Latency, Throughput and
Availability. In this blog post I will focus on Availability.
If a telecom database is down it means that no phone calls can be
made, internet connections will not work and your app on your
smartphone will cease to work. So more or less impacting each and
everyone's life immediately.
The same requirements on databases now also start to appear in AI
applications such as online Fraud detection, self-driving cars,
smartphone apps.
Availability is measured in percent and for telecom databases the
requirement is to reach 99.9999% availability. One often calls
this Class 6 availability where 6 is the number of nines in the
availability percentage.
Almost every database …
[Read more]