What does the term “high availability” signify?

The term "high availability" refers to the design and implementation of systems that ensure continuous operational performance and accessibility, even in the face of failures or issues. This concept is crucial in cloud computing and IT infrastructure where minimizing downtime is essential for maintaining user trust and operational efficiency.

Ensuring a system remains accessible and operational during failures means employing strategies such as redundancy, failover mechanisms, and load balancing. These strategies allow the system to quickly divert traffic to backup resources or components if one part of the system encounters a problem, thus maintaining uptime and reliability. This approach is vital for mission-critical applications that need to be online at all times.

In contrast, limited access to a system suggests a lack of redundancy or protection against failures, which contradicts the essence of high availability. Similarly, complete dependency on a single server for operations does not align with the principles of high availability, as it presents a single point of failure. Lastly, a requirement for constant manual intervention undermines the goal of creating a self-sustaining system that can automatically respond to issues without human involvement, a hallmark of high availability designs.