High Availability: Ensuring Reliability and Performance

MindFire’s Next Gen Platform is designed with high availability (HA) in mind, ensuring that the system remains operational even in the face of server failures, application crashes, or database disruptions. This is achieved by implementing HA at three levels: Server, Application, and Database.

1. Server-Level High Availability

MindFire has transitioned from traditional server-based architecture to a containerized infrastructure with auto-scaling.

• Previously, if a server crashed, it would take up to 10 minutes for another server to come online.
• Now, containers are used instead of servers, enabling near-instant recovery—if a container crashes, another one is automatically launched within a second.
• This approach ensures faster recovery times and improved system resilience compared to traditional server-based HA.

2. Application-Level High Availability

MindFire’s application is built using a clustering approach, where multiple processes work together to maintain uptime.

• The primary process never runs the application code but instead monitors child processes.
• If a child process crashes, the primary process immediately starts a new one, preventing downtime.
• This approach has resulted in zero downtime over the last three years, eliminating the need for manual remediation.

3. Database-Level High Availability

MindFire utilizes MongoDB Atlas, a managed database service that ensures high availability through replication and sharding.

• Each database shard has at least three nodes: one primary and two secondary. (There's also a read-only 4th node replica set that's used only for real-time analytics purposes).
• Data is written to the primary and at least one secondary before being confirmed, ensuring redundancy.
• If the primary node fails, a secondary node automatically takes over, and a new secondary is created.
• For high-volume clients, MindFire uses sharding, distributing data across multiple shards to improve performance and prevent database bottlenecks.
• This approach significantly improves data reliability, prevents data loss, and enhances system scalability.

Additional enhancements for HA

MindFire also incorporates:
✅ Auto-Archiving: Older logs and data are automatically archived to optimize database performance.
✅ Continuous Integration & Deployment (CI/CD): Automated deployments and rollbacks ensure fast and secure software updates.
✅ Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Fully automated infrastructure management for seamless scaling and deployment.

Why High Availability matters

With this multi-layered HA strategy, MindFire ensures:

• Minimal downtime, even in case of failures.
• Faster recovery, reducing business disruptions.
• Scalability, allowing the platform to grow with customer demands.
• Improved performance and reliability, ensuring a smooth user experience.

By leveraging modern cloud technologies, MindFire has achieved an enterprise-grade high availability system—at a fraction of the cost of traditional infrastructures.