High availability versus fault tolerance
WHAT IT TESTS: grasp of resilience tiers. OUTLINE: HA minimizes downtime via redundancy and failover; fault tolerance survives failure with zero interruption. RED FLAG: treating them as synonyms or equating multi-AZ with true tolerance.
WHAT IT TESTS: whether you distinguish degraded recovery from seamless continuity. ANSWER OUTLINE: HA accepts brief downtime, using load balancers across multiple AZs with health checks and auto-failover; fault tolerance masks failure entirely through active-active redundancy, replicated state, and no single point of failure. Moving from HA to FT means redundant components at every layer and synchronous replication. RED FLAG: calling them identical, or claiming multi-AZ alone guarantees fault tolerance without addressing data and session state.
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- #high-availability
- #fault-tolerance
- #cloud-architecture
- #redundancy
- #resilience
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