Scalable Availability in Software Architecture

About This Course

Most availability problems aren’t caused by one big failure. They come from small decisions, an unowned dependency, an SLA nobody actually measures, that compound until the system can’t stay up under real conditions. This course covers the patterns and decisions that separate resilient systems from fragile ones, drawn from techniques proven in SaaS, e-commerce, and enterprise systems.

This is the first of two companion courses, best taken in this order, followed by Cloud Architecture for Scalable Systems. It stands on its own if availability is the problem in front of you right now.

What You’ll Learn

• Telling availability and reliability apart, and designing for both instead of assuming one implies the other
• Measuring availability and defining SLAs that mean something operationally, beyond what a dashboard reports
• Managing service APIs, ownership, and dependencies across a distributed system
• Implementing service tiers to control blast radius and isolate failures
• Architecting for scale using cloud-native patterns
• Running capacity management, incident response, and monitoring as one connected practice

Who This Is For

Software architects, operations architects, and aspiring architects designing systems that need to stay available under real-world load, the kind a demo never produces.

Course Structure

Five modules covering availability fundamentals, SLA measurement, service API design, service tier implementation, and large-scale architecture — approximately 8 hours total.