Service’s gold standard
The gold standard for service availability in the olden days was the “dial tone.” You could pick up the phone and you always knew that familiar tone would be there to greet you. Managing mission-critical software services needs a similar gold standard. With clients utilizing SaaS for critical information exchange across multiple processes and time zones, the expectation is for SaaS platforms to always be available and always performing. Even scheduled downtime for upgrades can be troublesome for business-critical activities.

This standard for platform availability is indeed very much out of the reach of most commercial SaaS platforms today. Some of the challenges are due to lack of rigor in software design and testing, while others have to do with lack of operational environments which are meant for high-availability services.

What is high availability and how do we measure it?
Before we delve into how to plan service management for highly available SaaS platforms, it is important to understand how to best measure availability. We also need to set the expectations for various platform components to deliver high availability service.