Name: ⚡Lightning Talk: High Availability With '503: Unavailable' - Robert-Jan Huijsman, Reboot
Start: 2025-04-03T16:45:00+0100
End: 2025-04-03T16:50:00+0100

In-person
1-4 April 2025
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Thursday April 3, 2025 16:45 - 16:50 BST

Level 0 | ICC Auditorium

Traditionally, we think "high availability" ("HA") means "very rarely responds '503: Unavailable'". Our applications and platforms have a lot of code to support that. For example, Knative contains a "Queue-Proxy" that holds requests while an application is scaling up - so that it doesn't have to respond "503: Unavailable" while the application is unavailable!

However, users don’t care about HTTP return codes - they care when their request is answered. Can we deliver a great user experience without the complexity of buffering in-flight requests?

We recently took a different approach to HA: an application (built using Envoy, Istio, and gRPC) that doesn't hesitate to return "503: Unavailable" and expects clients to retry. We found this approach reduces complexity drastically, while maintaining all the metrics our users care about. In this talk we'll discuss which applications might see benefits from this approach, the pitfalls we had to avoid, and whether we're still "Highly Available".

Speakers

Robert-Jan Huijsman

Founding Engineer, Reboot

My passion is building systems - especially computer systems and the human systems (organizations) that build them. I studied computer science in Amsterdam, worked at Google (Spanner, Firebase) in Silicon Valley, ran my own intercontinental startup (Tracis), and am now the entire... Read More →

Thursday April 3, 2025 16:45 - 16:50 BST
Level 0 | ICC Auditorium

⚡ Lightning Talks, Application Development

Content Experience Level Any

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025

Robert-Jan Huijsman

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