FluxNodes: Achieving High Availability By Redundancy (Horizontal Scaling)

The ongoing push to make Flux the leader of Web3 is all about speed, scale, and, most important, decentralization. Learn more about the how and why this matters.

Over the course of the last decade, cloud infrastructure has presented (and continues to present) itself as a viable choice for organizations and businesses, especially for teams looking to focus solely on developing their product and getting it to the market while outsourcing their more technical backend management. The flexibility, scaling options, and lower financial requirements instead of setting up on-premise infrastructure make it a great alternative. However, with the use of cloud infrastructure and resources comes the question of high availability.

High availability refers to the ability of computing infrastructures to continue functioning continuously for a designated period, thus ensuring higher than normal uptimes even if one of its components fails. This design is necessary to keep apps on the network running and eliminate potential points of failure in the hosting infrastructure.

Back in the early 2000s, it was a common sight to see web apps completely taken down for maintenance purposes. But then, if you were running a high-traffic application like an eCommerce store or payment app, downtimes have huge loss risks. In addition, an application’s availability has a significant impact on the level of trust and reliability users put in it. While companies like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and other cloud providers all played a significant role in the achievements of high availability systems on the web2 internet, the rise of a decentralized Web3 internet and blockchain technology demands a new approach to the high availability demands of applications hosted in the cloud.

There are a few reasons for this; first, the Web3 internet maintains the ideals of decentralization and user-centric control, which would require the elimination of third parties and central entities. Also, there are limitations in the architecture of the current web 2.0 legacy enterprises and host providers which pose a restriction to the variety of Web3 applications they can handle. Web3 problems require Web3 solutions. Due to the nature of decentralized applications that would run on the Web3 internet, there is a need for a tailor-made solution to address the issue of high availability.

This is where Flux steps in as a BaaS (Blockchain as a service) solution provider.

The Flux ecosystem sustains a Web3 focused approach, and as such, it is equipped to deal with cloud infrastructural problems for the new iteration of the web. But how exactly does the ecosystem help applications on the Web3 internet to achieve high availability? The answer is simple; FluxNodes.

Important Components of a High Availability System:

To consider a system as a highly available one, there have to be some components in place. FluxNodes, the computational network of the flux ecosystem, demonstrates these features.

Redundancy:

Redundancy means individual elements vital to operations have a fallback within the system architecture. This ensures the failure of any of these components does not drag down the application to a grinding halt. Failure at some level of system operation or the other is inevitable. Therefore redundancy serves as the bridge to keep things running.

Monitoring:

The system must continuously access and determine when any server or component in the network has either malfunctioned or stopped working. This, in turn, will initiate a set of automated processes that automatically redistribute requests off the defective component and re-route the same to another node/server. This must be done without a consequential loss in data, which is why the infrastructure must also be able to sustain a data backup and recovery system.

Network Load Balancing:

This is responsible for redistributing traffic to other servers that are still working. While network load balancing allows for the seamless transition of server requests without affecting the application accessibility, it is also an important factor that can help in horizontal scaling.

How does FluxNodes integrate these features into a solution for high availability?

Flux runs thousands of widely distributed nodes across its network, ensuring that in the failure or malfunction of one node, other nodes in the region automatically power the assets running on the malfunctioning node, ensuring the application remains running and online. Also, the nodes are decentralized in operations, but they are also decentralized geographically. Flux currently operates more than 10,000 nodes in a dozen countries. Therefore, in the case of a generalized power outage or another disaster hitting a particular region, other nodes kick in and keep Dapps hosted on the network running.

Applications running on FluxNodes leverage the Flux operating system for effective data storage and data replication across different nodes. So, even in the improbable event of data corruption or loss on a node, the integrity of the original data is preserved and can still be served via other servers in the region. The FluxNodes network will leverages node clustering to provide instant failover application services in the case of any fault. In this cluster mode, information and data can be shared between multiple nodes. Yet, in the case of one node going down, the cluster can still keep on functioning while maintaining data duplicity and integrity.

The goal of high availability architecture for decentralized applications running on the Web3 internet is to decrease downtimes and, in doing that, improve their reliability. Customer satisfaction can only be guaranteed when users can access products and services on the Web3 internet when they want that. FluxNodes thus works as an operational network of decentralized computing power that gives the ability for developers to build applications on a high availability cloud infrastructure.

To ensure high availability, Flux shuts down nodes that cannot provide a specific percentage of uptime. This way, only high-end hardware capable of delivering maximal uptimes participate in the network. The nodes all run redundantly using the Flux operating system and with no single point of failure. Thus, the redundant nature of FluxNodes allows for the transition from traditional serverless systems that run on third-party entities into distributed computing environments that are not only decentralized but also less dependent on centralized providers.

Want to learn more about Flux? Visit us here: Runonflux.io.