Gateway Availability groups - Platform - BlueCat Gateway - 23.1

Gateway Administration Guide

Locale
English
Product name
BlueCat Gateway
Version
23.1

Availability groups help ensure continuous Gateway response to user requests. An Availability group is a paired set of two Gateway instances, sometimes called "nodes". If the Primary node fails, the other takes over.

Use of Availability groups requires a DNS server, such as a BlueCat DNS/DHCP Server (BDDS). When accessing Gateway, customers will not use a direct IP address. Instead, they'll access Gateway through a fully-qualified domain name, which will then point to only one of the nodes, whichever is designated as Primary.

  • The Primary node runs Gateway apps, receives user requests (through the DNS host record), and performs Gateway-related operations on your infrastructure.

  • The Secondary node is a separate, standby Gateway instance that monitors the Primary instance, but should otherwise remain dormant. If the Secondary node detects that the Primary node has failed, then the Secondary node will take over, updating host records on the DNS Server to indicate that it is now the Primary node. This node will then respond to Gateway user requests in the failed node's place.

Note: Gateway does nothing to stop workflows on a Secondary node from executing and performing operations. Workflows on Gateway instances within an Availability group should be built such that they detect whether they are on a Secondary node, and if so, to do nothing.