Warm Standby
Warm standby is a disaster recovery and high availability strategy where a secondary system is kept in a partially active state, ready to take over operations if the primary system fails. It involves maintaining a backup environment with pre-installed software and periodic data synchronization, but it is not fully running in parallel with the primary system. This approach balances cost and recovery time, offering faster failover than cold standby but with less redundancy than hot standby.
Developers should learn and implement warm standby in scenarios where downtime must be minimized but budget constraints limit the use of fully redundant systems, such as in e-commerce platforms, financial services, or critical business applications. It is particularly useful for ensuring business continuity during hardware failures, maintenance, or unexpected outages, as it reduces recovery time compared to cold standby while avoiding the high costs of hot standby setups.