active-active vs. active-passive

networkingcloud

The two shapes of high availability: both nodes serving traffic, or one serving while the other waits.

Active-passive is simpler to reason about and idles half the hardware; active-active uses everything and doubles the failure modes - notably the risk that each node runs fine alone but the pair cannot agree who owns what. BIG-IP HA pairs, firewall clusters, and databases all wrestle with the same trade.

Also known as: active-active, active-passive

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