Salon booking site that survives a zone outage

DesignEasy25 min

Your task

Your company runs an online booking site for 8,000 hair salons. Customers book appointments, and salons manage their calendars. Everything runs in one zone of a cloud region. That is 6 app servers behind a load balancer, a Postgres database, and a Redis server that holds login sessions. Last month that zone lost power for 3 hours, and the site was down the whole time.

The region has 3 zones, each in its own building with its own power. The load balancer can send traffic to servers in any of them. The managed database can keep a standby copy in another zone. The standby is updated on every commit and takes over in about 1 minute.

At the Saturday peak the site handles 1,000 requests a second, and one app server handles about 250. After a zone fails, the site may be down for a few minutes, but no confirmed booking may be lost.

Where does each part of the site run, and what happens in the minutes after a zone fails?

It covers

  • Zone outages
  • Server capacity
  • Sessions