Low Availability Design
Low Availability Design is a software architecture approach that intentionally reduces system availability to optimize for other factors like cost, simplicity, or development speed. It involves designing systems to tolerate or even expect downtime, rather than striving for high availability (e.g., 99.9% uptime). This concept is often applied in scenarios where occasional unavailability is acceptable, such as internal tools, development environments, or non-critical applications.
Developers should consider Low Availability Design when building systems where high availability is not a priority, such as internal dashboards, batch processing jobs, or prototypes, to reduce complexity and infrastructure costs. It is particularly useful in cost-sensitive projects, rapid development cycles, or when dealing with legacy systems where achieving high availability would be prohibitively expensive. This approach allows teams to focus resources on core functionality rather than redundancy and failover mechanisms.