In application development, there is a lot of talk about the -ilities. The purpose of this article is to gather a few definitions and explanations of the -ilities together.
Upgrade-ability - the ability to upgrade software, without interrupting service. Can be referred to as "0 downtime" upgrade.
Horizontal Scalability - The ability to increase or decrease capacity of the system by adding or removing instances of services. Ideally, we would like to achieve this without service interruption.
Vertical Scalability - The ability to increase or decrease capacity of the system by adding or removing threads to the running instance of the service. Or to put it another way, how much can the component itself stretch before we have to add more instances of the component.
Availability - The amount of time the service is available to users. Commonly measured % time uptime per year, for example 99.999%. This means the service can be unavailable for a total of 5.26 minutes per year.
Stability - the amount of time the system is running as expected. Less scientific to calculate than availability.
Capability - the list of features that the system/service supports.
Capacity - the load limitations of the system/service. This can be scientifically measured, but different metrics apply for different types of services. For example for certain services the number of operations per second may be important. For other services the amount of data (Bytes per second) processed per second might be important.
No comments:
Post a Comment