Maintaining a seamless, uninterrupted user experience is central to effective workload orchestration. With today’s technology environments spanning on-premise and cloud networks, disparate teams and connected devices, flexible and well-thought-out strategies are essential.
It’s a complex challenge and expert advice can be invaluable. Below, its members Forbes Technology Council share their experience and tips for developing an effective workload orchestration system. Leverage their expertise to help your team deliver reliable, optimized services and a great user experience.
1. Integrate Multicloud Platforms with Automatic Failover
By integrating multicloud platforms with automated failover mechanisms, workloads can be dynamically shifted from one cloud provider to another in the event of an outage, ensuring minimal downtime. This also allows the implementation of load balancing techniques that dynamically distribute traffic across multiple regions, ensuring optimal performance while preventing overload on any single node. – Bhaskar Gangipamula, Quadrant Technologies
2. Combine workload distribution with monitoring and recovery
The strategy should include two parts. First, distribute workloads across multiple availability zones to ensure high availability. Second, have monitoring and recovery systems in place that include early alerts, self-healing capabilities, and regular backups. – Ravi Laudya, SAP Concur
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3. Leverage Container Orchestration
One strategy for high availability and fault tolerance is to use container orchestration tools like Kubernetes. These tools break your application into smaller containers that are distributed across multiple servers. If one server fails, Kubernetes automatically shifts the workload to the other, healthy container, ensuring minimal downtime and uninterrupted service—like a backup system that keeps everything running smoothly. – KJ Dhaliwal, Lotus Health AI
4. Set up autonomous AI agents
Autonomous AI agents provide real value by analyzing patterns in system logs, performance metrics, and error rates. They can proactively identify issues before they lead to downtime. By detecting anomalies and anticipating potential failures, these agents can trigger proactive actions, such as scaling resources, rerouting traffic, or spinning up services, to ensure high availability. – Manjula Iyer, 98point6 Technologies
5. Consider this three-step approach
Having built a highly available and fault-tolerant VoIP soft switch, we took three important steps. First, we deployed across multiple cloud providers to eliminate outages caused by underlying data center failures. Second, end-user devices were registered to different nodes, preventing the entire site from experiencing problems. Finally, we used active live environments that are always in sync, allowing us to redefine traffic in real time. – Hamed Mazrouei, Milagro
6. Validate your availability and fault tolerance in non-crisis situations
There is no substitute for validating your high availability and fault tolerance strategy on a regular basis in non-crisis situations. Make the necessary adjustments during these validation periods to improve the resilience of your solution. A best practice would be to spend the appropriate amount of time up front to plan the strategy and then validate it with current operations to make updates as needed. – Russ Kennedy, Nasuni
7. Use a hybrid installation
An effective strategy is to use a multicloud or hybrid setup. This spreads the workload across different cloud providers, reducing the risk of downtime. Combine this with auto-scaling and load balancing, which adjust resources based on demand and use automation to detect and resolve problems early, keeping systems running smoothly without manual intervention. – Ehsan Ahmadi, Vox Solutions
8. Leverage a microservices-based architecture
A microservices-based architecture helps prevent single points of failure by distributing functionality. Design services to be nimble and stateless, decoupling state to enhance resiliency and scalability. Use self-healing orchestration tools like Kubernetes and adopt active configurations for data and state management to ensure continuous availability and strong fault tolerance. – Koushik Sundar, Citibank
9. Create a disconnected system
You can achieve high availability and fault tolerance in many ways, but at what cost? Tools like Kubernetes and load balancers can help. But to effectively achieve high availability and fault tolerance, you should create a decoupled system so that different components are isolated and have only the necessary dependencies between them. This will allow you to orchestrate the workload for only those components that require it. – Oleg Lola, MobiDev
10. Focus on Optimization
One strategy to ensure high availability and fault tolerance through efficient workload orchestration is to focus on optimization. Not every node needs the same amount of processing power. It’s important to have load balancing functionality and stress testing to stay ahead of the game. – Syed Ahmed, Act-On software
11. Follow the Principle that “Everything Fails, Always”
This may be a little more philosophical, but when designing any critical system, I follow this principle: “Everything fails, all the time.” This mindset leads to designs that eliminate single points of failure, favor distributed systems with a “shared nothing” architecture, and incorporate queuing mechanisms. Although often overlooked, non-software resiliency—such as multi-region deployments and robust network configurations—is also important, even in the cloud. – Elliott Cordeau, Data Center
12. Use Containerization And Automated Scaling
An effective way to keep things running smoothly is to use containers and automated scaling. This allows you to isolate applications, which makes them consistent across environments. Orchestrators help by automatically managing these containers and evenly distributing the workload while monitoring for failures. When a problem is detected, the orchestrator can be adjusted with little to no downtime. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
13. Implementation of message queues and asynchronous processing patterns
Based on our experience building healthcare applications, implementing message queues and asynchronous processing patterns is a must. By decoupling services and using tools like RabbitMQ, we create buffer zones that prevent system overload. If a component slows down, messages remain in the queue until processing capacity is restored. – Mark Fisher, Dogtown Media LLC
14. Use Active-Passive Failover Architectures
Use active-passive failover architectures by designing your system with an active presence and a passive standby. The passive instance takes over in case of failure, ensuring minimal downtime. – Manasi Sharma, Microsoft
15. Provision of Multiple Dismissals
Use unnecessary hardware, software and network components. Apply load balancing to evenly distribute workloads and clustering to allow multiple servers to work as a single system, improving performance. Use database replication to ensure data accessibility at all locations, even during failures. Together, these strategies ensure high availability and fault tolerance, creating a resilient infrastructure. – Brian Sathianathan, Iterate.ai
16. Use service mesh architecture with open source tools
An overlooked strategy I’d like to highlight is using a service mesh architecture with open source tools like Istio or Linkerd. By removing the management of network traffic between services, you gain fine-grained control over load balancing, failover, and automatic failover. This approach will ensure high availability and fault tolerance without adding complexity to the application code. – Santhosh Vijayabaskar
17. Implementation of “Degraded Mode” Features.
Apply “downgrade” capabilities to all critical services. Instead of up-down binaries, design systems to gracefully reduce functionality when under pressure. For example, disable real-time updates while keeping the underlying transactions running, or view cached data instead of live queries. This ensures business continuity even in the event of a few failures. – Chandra Kuchi, Robinhood
18. Take a proactive approach
A proactive approach to continuous improvement and optimization is essential to ensure high availability and fault tolerance in workload orchestration. Instead of waiting until resources are maxed out, regularly assess and tune systems to anticipate and mitigate potential failures. This strategy allows for adjustments that keep the workload balanced and resilient over time. – Adrian Stelmach, EXPLITIA
