Floating IPs: Start Architecting Your Applications for High Availability

High Availability is key to any production environment. It grants us peace of mind knowing our application is architected to withstand failure scenarios.

A Floating IP is an IP address that can be instantly moved from one Droplet to another Droplet in the same datacenter.

Part of a highly available infrastructure is being able to immediately point an IP address to a redundant server. This is now possible with the addition of Floating IPs.

How It Works
Single points of failure can be the downfall of any application. With Floating IPs, customers can associate an IP address with a different Droplet, with minimal downtime. This makes it possible to set up a standby Droplet, ready to receive your production traffic at a moment’s notice.

Automatic Failover
With a bit of scripting,  you’re able to set up redundant load balancers that automatically fail over. If the primary load balancer goes offline, your traffic can be redirected to the secondary one with minimal application downtime.

Smooth Upgrades
Floating IPs aren’t just for failover situations. You can also use them for application upgrades. For example, you can spin up a new Droplet, run the upgrades on the new Droplet, and then switch the flow of traffic to the new Droplet.

Getting Started
The easiest way to start using Floating IPs is to get in contact with us.