Failover Clustering
Failover clustering is a high-availability technology that groups multiple servers (nodes) into a cluster to provide redundancy and automatic failover for critical applications and services. If one node fails, the cluster automatically transfers workloads to another healthy node, minimizing downtime and ensuring continuous operation. It is commonly used in enterprise environments to maintain service availability for databases, file servers, and virtual machines.
Developers should learn and use failover clustering when building or managing systems that require high availability, such as mission-critical applications, financial services, or healthcare systems where downtime is unacceptable. It is essential for ensuring business continuity, disaster recovery, and load balancing across servers, particularly in scenarios involving SQL Server, Hyper-V, or file-sharing services.