REL11-BP02: Fail over to healthy resources

Automatic failover mechanisms ensure that when failures are detected, traffic and workloads are seamlessly redirected to healthy resources. This includes both planned failover for maintenance and unplanned failover for unexpected failures, maintaining service availability while failed components are recovered.

Implementation Steps

1. Health Check Configuration

Implement comprehensive health checks that accurately determine resource health status.

2. Automatic Failover Logic

Design failover mechanisms that can make decisions without human intervention.

3. Traffic Routing

Configure intelligent traffic routing to direct requests to healthy resources.

4. State Management

Ensure application state is properly managed during failover scenarios.

5. Failback Procedures

Implement automated failback when failed resources are restored to healthy state.

Detailed Implementation

AWS Services

Primary Services

Elastic Load Balancing: Automatic traffic distribution and health checking
Amazon Route 53: DNS-based failover with health checks
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ: Automatic database failover
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling: Instance-level failover and replacement

Supporting Services

AWS Global Accelerator: Global traffic management and failover
Amazon CloudWatch: Health monitoring and alarm-based failover triggers
Amazon SNS: Failover event notifications
AWS Lambda: Custom failover logic and automation

Benefits

Automatic Recovery: Seamless failover without manual intervention
Reduced Downtime: Faster recovery through pre-configured failover paths
Multi-Layer Protection: Failover at DNS, load balancer, and application levels
Geographic Distribution: Cross-region failover capabilities
State Preservation: Maintain application state during failover events