CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-004)Cloud ArchitectureMedium
A cloud administrator needs to ensure that a critical application remains available during maintenance events or unexpected outages within a single cloud region. The application's virtual machines should automatically restart on healthy hardware if the underlying physical server fails. Which high availability strategy is being described?
- ALoad Balancing
- BFault Tolerance
- CAutomatic Failover
- DDisaster Recovery
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Automatic Failover
Automatic failover mechanisms detect failures in active components (like a VM on a failed server) and automatically switch processing to a standby or healthy component, ensuring continuous availability within a region.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Load balancing distributes traffic across healthy servers but does not inherently restart failed VMs or move them to healthy hardware.
- B. Fault tolerance implies continuous operation without any service interruption, often achieved through redundant, simultaneously active components, which is more stringent than automatic restart.
- D. Disaster recovery focuses on restoring services after a major regional outage, not typically on automatic restarts for single server failures within a region.
Automatic Failover
A high availability mechanism where a system automatically detects the failure of a primary component (e.g., server, database, VM) and switches operations to a redundant or standby component without manual intervention, minimizing downtime.
- Automated detection and switchover
- Minimizes human error and RTO
- Commonly used for VMs, databases, and network devices
- Requires redundant components and health checks
Memory trick: Failover's quick, disaster's deep, fault tolerance won't sleep.