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High Availability & Scalability

The SEW Platform is architected to meet the reliability, performance and elasticity requirements of modern industrial operations. From globally distributed cloud services to locally resilient on-premise gateways, SEW is designed to deliver continuous availability—even during peak load, infrastructure failures or single Availability Zone (AZ) outages. By building the SEW cloud infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leveraging AWS-native services for compute, storage, networking and orchestration, SEW achieves enterprise-grade resiliency and scale while maintaining strict security and multi-tenant isolation.

This page outlines the core architectural principles and mechanisms that ensure the platform remains resilient, scalable and predictable across all environments.

Cloud-Native High Availability​

SEW runs on a fully managed, cloud-native infrastructure built to eliminate single points of failure. High availability is achieved through:

Multi-AZ (Availability Zone) Redundancy​

All critical services are deployed across multiple AWS Availability Zones, ensuring that platform operations continue seamlessly even if one zone experiences degraded performance or a full outage.

AWS-Managed Durability & Replication​

Stateful data—including project data, metadata, audit logs, configuration, vault secrets and platform state—is stored in AWS services designed for:

  • Automatic replication
  • High durability
  • Transparent failover
  • Continuous backups

These AWS-managed layers significantly reduce the risk of data loss or service disruption.

Self-Healing Microservices ​

SEW uses stateless microservices deployed on AWS-managed compute platforms whenever possible. This ensures:

  • Rapid horizontal scaling
  • Automatic health checks
  • Instance replacement when failures occur
  • Zero-downtime rolling updates
  • Rapid restoration during failures

The combination of AWS orchestration and SEW microservice design results in highly resilient cloud operations.

Elastic Scalability ​

SEW scales dynamically in response to usage growth, user load and operational demand. AWS’s elastic services provide the underlying foundation for this horizontal scalability.

Horizontal Auto-Scaling Compute​

AWS auto-scaling mechanisms expand compute capacity based on:

  • IDEaaS session volume
  • Pipeline execution concurrency
  • API request load
  • Background job throughput

This ensures consistent and predictable performance regardless of customer size or usage spikes.

Distributed Pipeline Orchestration​

SEW pipeline execution uses orchestration services that enable:

  • Parallel execution across many gateways or devices
  • Load-aware scheduling
  • Fault-tolerant retry logic
  • Horizontal scaling during high-demand periods

This design enables large factories or global enterprises to run hundreds of automated workflows simultaneously.

Multi-Tenant Isolation with AWS Security Primitives​

AWS-native security controls enforce strict tenant isolation by design, ensuring:

  • Segregated compute resources for compute resource isolation
  • Separate data storage boundaries for data isolation
  • Isolation at API and identity layers

This guarantees that no tenant’s usage impacts the performance or availability of another.

On-Premise Reliability via the SEW Gateway​

High availability extends beyond the cloud. SEW Gateways running on-premise ensure local resilience and uninterrupted device operations.

Resilient Outbound-Only Connectivity​

Gateways maintain encrypted outbound tunnels to SEW services. If a connection path becomes unstable, the gateway automatically restores connectivity or switches to an alternative route.

Graceful Degradation​

Even during internet interruptions:

  • On-premise processes continue running
  • Completed pipeline results synchronize once cloud access is restored
  • IDEaaS sessions reconnect gracefully

This maintains operational stability within the factory.

Performance Optimization & Load Management​

To maintain performance during scale, SEW implements several AWS-enabled strategies:

Load Balancers​

AWS load balancing distributes traffic to optimal endpoints, reducing latency and preventing performance bottlenecks.

Adaptive Throttling​

SEW uses cloud-native monitoring and rate control to ensure:

  • Fair use across tenants
  • Protection from unintended overload
  • Consistent response times

Optimized Data Transfer Paths​

AWS networking and transfer acceleration services enable high-throughput, resilient communication even across constrained networks.

Enterprise-Ready Scalability Model​

The platform is designed to grow seamlessly across:

  • Global multi-factory deployments
  • Multiple regions or continents
  • Hundreds of gateways
  • Thousands of PLCs, robots, drives and HMIs
  • Large engineering teams using IDEaaS concurrently

Whether supporting a single pilot line or enterprise-wide digital transformation, SEW provides predictable, globally available and resilient industrial Backup and DevOps capabilities.