What is Geographical Failover
Failover is a mechanism that ensures service continuity whereby single-point failures are eliminated. It is a mechanism because failover has to be minutiously designed, implemented, and deployed. There are several types of failover mechanisms but the most resilient configuration spans geographical locations.
Geographical failover is a redundant system that is made to survive disruptions that can involve whole regions. Geographical failover eliminates certain weaknesses inherent to natural disasters, man-made disasters, mistakes, and law enforcement orders. Going forward, we will focus on geographical failover or commonly abbreviated as geo failover, as we will refer to it henceforth.
Traditionally, however, failover is implemented at the network level of the infrastructure to prevent network disruptions. But in reality, there are several elements of an infrastructure that could experience disruption and therefore render the whole unusable. Even though network failover is implemented on almost any network today, disruptions still occur. This is unfortunately bound to happen. The latter is analogous to constructing a strong bullet-proof front-door for a house when the windows are vulnerable and fragile.
In the same train of thought, a geo failover house would be a set of two identical houses located in different neighborhoods or cities. Should one house be robbed or completely destroyed, the backup house is used instead. This geo redundancy comes at a cost. One has to build a second house, the hot backup or redundant house, with identical characteristics, furnitures, and provisions.
Of course, there’s a price to pay for an independently successful failover plan. The cost, however, far outweighs the outcome of disruptions. In the case of a business, disruptions cause material loss due to missing out on revenue opportunities because potential customers cannot reach you or your online store. In the next post, we will discuss an implementation of geo failover based on the most successful hosting platform in the world.
Stay tuned!