High availability in Aiven for Dragonfly®#

Aiven for Dragonfly® offers different plans with varying levels of high availability. The available features depend on the selected plan. Refer to the table below for a summary of these plans:

Important

Aiven for Dragonfly® is currently a limited availability service. If you are interested in exploring this offering, reach out to our sales team at sales@Aiven.io for more information and access.

Plan	Node configuration	High availability & failover features	Backup features	Backup history
Startup	Single-node	Limited availability. No automatic failover.	During limited availability, only one latest snapshot stored.	1 day
Business	Two-node (primary + standby)	High availability with automatic failover to a standby node if the primary fails.	During limited availability, only one latest snapshot stored.	3 days
Premium	Three-node (primary + standby + standby)	Enhanced high availability with automatic failover among multiple standby nodes if the primary fails.	During limited availability, only one latest snapshot stored.	13 days
Custom	Custom configurations	Custom high availability and failover features based on user requirements.	During limited availability, only one latest snapshot stored.	Custom based on user requirements

Failure handling#

Minor failures: Aiven automatically handles minor failures, such as service process crashes or temporary loss of network access, without any significant changes to the service deployment. In all plans, the service automatically restores regular operation by restarting crashed processes or restoring network access when available.
Severe failures: In case of severe hardware or software problems, such as losing an entire node, more drastic recovery measures are required. Aiven’s monitoring infrastructure automatically detects a failing node when it reports problems with its self-diagnostics or stops communicating altogether. The monitoring infrastructure then schedules the creation of a new replacement node.

Note

In case of database failover, your service’s Service URI remains the same—only the IP address changes to point to the new primary node.

High availability for business, premium, and custom plans#

If a standby Dragonfly node fails, the primary node continues running. The system prepares the replacement standby node and synchronizes it with the primary for normal operations to resume.

In case the primary Dragonfly node fails, the standby node is evaluated for promotion to the new primary based on data from the Aiven monitoring infrastructure. Once promoted, this node starts serving clients, and a new node is scheduled to become the standby. However, during this transition, there may be a brief service interruption.

If the primary and standby nodes fail simultaneously, new nodes will be created automatically to replace them. However, this may lead to data loss as the primary node is restored from the latest backup. As a result, any database writes made since the last backup could be lost.

Note

The duration for replacing a failed node depends mainly on the cloud region and the amount of data to be restored. For Business, Premium, and Custom plans with multiple nodes, this process is automatic and requires no administrator intervention, but service interruptions may occur during the recreation of nodes.

Single-node startup service plans#

Losing the only node in the service triggers an automatic process of creating a new replacement node. The new node then restores its state from the latest available backup and resumes serving customers.

Since there was just a single node providing the service, the service will be unavailable for the duration of the restore operation. All the write operations made since the last backup are lost.