The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods N4N044: Redundancy Vs. High Availability Part 2 – HA Networking Isn’t Free
Dec 4, 2025
The conversation dives into the crucial distinctions between redundancy and high availability in network design. Certifications often fall short in addressing real-world HA goals. Ethan explains rapid failure detection with BFD for improved uptime. They explore active-active versus active-standby architectures, and the challenges of capacity planning. The duo also discusses the importance of graceful degradation and proactive failure detection using AI. Additionally, they emphasize the need to quantify business losses to justify investments in high availability.
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HA Is A Design Goal, Redundancy A Technique
- High availability is a design goal while redundancy is one technique to achieve it.
- Design thinking must start from foundations and add features to reach availability targets.
Use BFD For Sub‑Second Failure Detection
- Use rapid failure detection like BFD to shrink detection and convergence to sub-second times.
- Configure routing to use BFD so routing protocols rapidly remove failed neighbors and reroute traffic.
Active‑Active Ensures Systems Really Work
- Active-active deployments keep systems exercised so you know they work before failover.
- Design capacity so one remaining active member can handle peak load after a failure.