High-Availability Architectures

If you haven't watched the load balancing section of the network services module, it's high time to do it now - you won't be able to understand the rest of this module without having a good grasp of load balancing fundamentals.

This webinar covers typical design scenarios encountered when building a disaster recovery data center or deploying multiple data centers in an active-active configuration.

Access content

Networking and virtualization vendors keep proposing crazier and crazier ideas that are supposed to allow you to run active-active data centers without touching the application architecture. Not surprisingly, most of them fail disastrously under the right failure conditions.

If you want to have a highly-available application, there's simply no substitute for good design including global and local load balancing. In his presentation, Ethan Banks described the architecture he used when running multiple data centers for a large credit card payment processor, and lessons learned while operating them.

The high-availability discussions in Spring 2017 course focused on:

• stretched VLANs and availability zones;
• swimlanes;
• applications that cannot handle IP address changes;
• differences between inline and one-arm load balancers;
• distributed data centers with scale-out applications;
• external routing with multiple active-active data centers.

These ExpertExpress case studies cover typical high-availability scenarios, from redundant Internet connectivity to disaster recovery and workload migration using virtual appliances.

In this assignment you'll extend an existing leaf-and-spine fabric into a new data center that's currently being built by your customer.