Which of the following practices is primarily aimed at maintaining application performance and availability?

The practice primarily aimed at maintaining application performance and availability is Incident Management. This practice focuses on detecting, responding to, and resolving incidents that could disrupt the normal operation of an application or service. The goal of Incident Management is to restore service operation as quickly as possible, minimizing any negative impact on users and the business.

Incident Management involves having processes in place for tracking incidents, communicating with stakeholders, and performing post-incident reviews to learn and improve from each event. This practice is crucial for ensuring that applications remain reliable and performant, as it directly addresses issues that could affect their availability.

While Continuous Integration, Build Automation, and Configuration Management are important parts of the software development and operational lifecycle, they primarily focus on different aspects. Continuous Integration is about frequently merging code changes to avoid integration issues, Build Automation pertains to the process of automatically building and preparing application code, and Configuration Management ensures that software configurations are maintained consistently across environments. Though these practices indirectly contribute to application performance, it is Incident Management that is specifically tailored to deal with the immediate challenges of maintaining that performance and availability when issues arise.