Understanding Failover Groups
Why use Failover Groups?
There are two major use cases for Failover Groups:
- Application resilience
By building and nominating a secondary backup on a different cloud provider or data center you can use a failover group to switch your visitors from the Primary to the Backup application with ease. - Cloning applications
If you need to clone or rebuild your application, you can use a failover group to switch your traffic to the new application without interruptions to your service.
How Failover Groups work
A Failover Group follows the web head of your application. In other words, it points to either your load balancer or your web server (if you don’t have a load balancer).
A Failover Group will automatically update to point at a newly added load balancer. Similarly, it will be automatically updated when you rename your application or web servers.
Testing Failover Groups
A great way to test Failover Groups is to use the dig command in your terminal, for example dig 414-262-781.cloud66.net. This allows you to see exactly where the Cloud 66 DNS is pointing.
