The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods N4N043: Redundancy vs. High Availability Part 1
Nov 20, 2025
Holly and Ethan dissect the crucial differences between redundancy and high availability, sharing real-world insights from various industries. They tackle common objections about cost and space when implementing redundancy strategies. The duo navigates through protocol-level redundancy with DHCP and DNS, as well as routing protocols like ECMP. They also dive into advanced topics such as Anycast for global load sharing and strategies for redundant data centers. Expect a preview of challenges related to complexity and failure detection in subsequent discussions!
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Redundancy Is A Means, Not The Goal
- Redundancy is one tool in the toolbox, not identical to high availability.
- High availability is the goal; redundancy is one of several techniques to reach it.
Start By Clarifying Requirements
- Ask whether the customer means redundancy or high availability before designing.
- Tailor designs to critical use cases like hospitals or finance and watch budget pushback.
Active/Standby Pairs With State Mirroring
- Ethan describes active/standby device pairs that mirror state on a dedicated link.
- He cites firewalls and load balancers as common examples with state sync links.
