Why Self-healing?
Service failures are an inevitable part of any IT infrastructure, whether they involve application services or Cloud resources. Often, these failures are due to insufficient resource allocation. To mitigate these issues, support teams are frequently required to be on call 24/7, to address even minor disruptions.
For many organisations, downtime not only results in significant financial loss but also necessitates high operational overheads to maintain round-the-clock support. Furthermore, prolonged application downtime can severely damage a company’s reputation, leading to customer dissatisfaction.
Given the unpredictable nature of Cloud resources and applications, many organisations struggle with frequent failures stemming from insufficient resources. The demand for continuous availability creates pressure to resolve issues swiftly and flawlessly.
This is where our Self-healing solution comes into play – a powerful automation strategy designed to recover application services or infrastructure issues triggered by an alarm. Once a recovery process is scripted, the rest is handled autonomously. This automation eliminates human error and reduces wait times for manual intervention, resulting in minimised downtime. This hands-free solution allows IT teams to focus on higher-priority tasks, knowing that services will be swiftly recovered.
How it works in practice...
At Cloud Elemental, we have successfully implemented our Self-healing solution for several clients, who have each reported significant improvements in efficiency and resilience.
In one particular use case, we provisioned Self-healing for a client’s application running on AWS EC2 instances. This application operated across multiple EC2 instances, with components distributed across different servers and some services dependent on others. The services ran on Windows, with parent-child relationships between them, meaning that a failure in one service could cause cascading failures in others.
The application’s traffic was managed by a Load Balancer which monitored the health of its targets. When a service failed, the unhealthy port triggered an alarm, kicking off the Self-healing workflow.
Based on service logs, we were able to monitor the application’s health and automatically initiate the Self-healing process. Each service has its own pre-agreed recovery script, designed to execute the necessary steps to restore functionality. In cases where a more severe failure occurred, a second layer of recovery actions would be initiated.
In this scenario, our Self-healing solution followed a three-stage process:
Action 1: Execute the script to heal the failed service.
Action 2: Reboot the server and restart services in the correct order.
Action 3: Create a support ticket and alert the support team.
In nearly all cases, Action 1 resolved the issue, making Actions 2 and 3 rarely necessary. However, having these additional steps in place ensured a failsafe approach for more complex failure scenarios.
Why invest in Self-healing?
The Self-healing system activates immediately upon detecting a failure, executing recovery steps faster than any tech team could respond. By automating the process, it eliminates human error and significantly reduces downtime, leading to cost savings proportional to the reduced downtime – a critical factor for businesses where every second of downtime has financial implications.
In summary: Self-healing – Quick recovery – Minimal downtime – Cost savings
Benefits:
• Proactive detection and recovery
• Intelligent, automated decision-making
• Comprehensive reporting throughout the process
• Minimal human interaction and manual processes
• Highly configurable to meet specific business needs
• Reduced downtime, improved productivity, and operational cost savings
Our Self-healing solution is designed to help businesses minimise disruption, streamline recovery, and focus resources where they matter most.
