What Are Zero Downtime Deployments?

In an increasingly digital world, people have grown accustomed to 24x7 service availability when making purchases or using digital products and services online. But the technical challenge businesses face in maintaining that high availability is not to be underestimated. 

Whether it’s planned downtime to migrate your application data and services over from legacy systems to new technologies or unplanned disasters, such as power blackouts and cyberattacks, server downtime is a common pain point for most businesses.

Enter zero downtime deployments. These IT infrastructure solutions are designed specifically to enable you to make routine upgrades and weather a disaster without having to suspend service to your customers.

But what exactly are zero downtime deployments and how do they work? To understand this, we’ll first discuss the reasons you may experience downtime, then break down the methods used to combat it.

What are zero downtime deployments?

Zero downtime deployments utilize a variety of methods to prevent interruptions in your web-based services. They protect your data while keeping the original deployment active until the new deployment is complete. 

While technologies and techniques may differ across organizations and technology stacks, the general idea is to build redundancy and resiliency into your storage and compute infrastructure so you can continue to run your apps and services through disasters and upgrades with zero disruptions or lapses in performance.

Common causes of downtime in the data center 

There are several reasons why your data center could experience downtime:

• Updates to both your infrastructure and software are a necessary part of maintaining any application or service delivered over the web. Downtime can occur while any major update is in progress.
• Database migrations can also cause downtime while in progress. A website or app may not function properly until the migration process is complete.
• Disasters, such as a power outage or cyberattack, can also cause downtime, disrupting services until the problem is resolved.

Any form of downtime that causes a disruption in your service can mean a loss of customers and revenue.

Common strategies for eliminating downtime

There are several ways you can ensure continuous uptime in your hardware and software deployments. Common strategies for eliminating downtime in the data center include: 

• Having built-in IT infrastructure resiliency through redundant storage arrays, cloud backups, and/or high-availability clustering
• Keeping technical debt low through routine maintenance and upgrades
• Investing in continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines

With the proper support and expertise, downtime can practically be eliminated from the equation.

Why choose Pure for zero downtime deployments?

Pure Storage is the market leader in flash storage arrays for a reason. We deliver zero downtime deployments through our Evergreen Storage™ subscription program. Our unique storage array architecture allows you to non-disruptively upgrade your storage infrastructure to the latest controllers, external host and internal array connections, solid-state disks (SSDs), and other components independently without interrupting service workloads. We also support active-active clustering for delivering synchronous replication for RPO zero and automatic transparent failover for RTO zero with Purity ActiveCluster™. We work with you to solve your data storage and data protection needs, offering growth that scales with your company and your data.