Skip to content
HLD Learn/Consistency & Availability
Browsing as a guest. Sign in to save your progress and earn XP as you complete chapters.

Availability Patterns: Failover & Redundancy

4 min read

You'll learn to

  • -Compare active-passive and active-active failover

Active-Passive Failover

One region (or replica) actively serves traffic; a standby sits idle, ready to take over if the primary fails. Simple to reason about, but wasteful (the standby's capacity sits unused most of the time), and failover itself takes time, meaning a real (if brief) outage window.

Active-Active

Multiple regions serve production traffic simultaneously, so no capacity sits idle and losing one region just means the others absorb its share. The cost is real: now two regions can both accept writes to the same data at the same time, and something has to resolve the conflict when they disagree.

Region A
Region B
Region A DB
Region B DB

Active-active: both regions serve live traffic and replicate to each other.

Region A DBRegion B DB- replicateRegion B DBRegion A DB- replicate

Interview Signal is part of Pro

See a real weak answer next to a real strong one for this exact topic.

Quiz is part of Pro

Test what you just read with a short quiz, and bank the XP.

Ready to Build This?

Level 26: Distributed Cache exercises these consistency trade-offs directly.