What is High Availability? How does a HA cluster work? In “High Availability Explained,” David Hay discusses how High Availability (HA) is used to ensure minimal application downtime when running services on a cluster. He’ll show you how to build out redundancy in a High Availability cluster to ensure minimal affect on application downtime during system failures. He’ll discuss the key concepts of cluster redundancy, including eliminating single points of failure, the shared-nothing principle, and finite state. Lastly, David will describe some accompanying concepts of HA clustering, including the balance of complexity and simplicity, ensuring systems can automatically recover from failure, and how to avoid other common pitfalls in design.