Today the Noviship database, hosted with Amazon Web Services, was upgraded to multi-zone infrastructure.  No down-time was experienced by users and the transition was smooth.

What does this mean for users?  The data we store (shipments, invoices, users and so on) is hosted in a reliable Amazon data-center and to date we have experienced over 99.99% up-time.  With this upgrade a second duplicate database in a different location will operate on standby.  Should our database encounter a problem (whether network connectivity or hardware failure) the system will instantly switch to the standby without impacting users.

This move follows the New Year switch to our new front-end cluster and as a result we now have full hardware duplication.