Which of the following is NOT a common strategy for achieving high availability in FOSSE?

• A. Redundancy With Failover
• B. Manual Failover Only
• C. Clustering
• D. Load Balancing

Answer: (B)

The main concept here is how high availability is achieved in FOSSE through automatic, redundant architectures rather than relying on manual interventions. High availability relies on systems designed to keep services running with minimal downtime, which means automatic mechanisms that detect failures and switch to healthy resources without human action.

Relying on redundancy with failover is a foundational approach: duplicate components or paths are kept ready, and when a failure is detected, the system automatically transfers workloads to the standby resources. This minimizes downtime and reduces the need for operator intervention.

Clustering is another common strategy because it groups multiple servers to work as a single unit, providing shared resources, health monitoring, and failover within the cluster so services remain available even if one node fails.

Load balancing distributes incoming requests across multiple healthy nodes, preventing any single point from becoming a bottleneck or a single point of failure. It also helps maintain availability by rerouting traffic away from failing components.

Manual failover operates in a very different way. It requires human action to switch over to a backup resource, which introduces delays, increases the risk of human error, and is not scalable for rapid or wide-ranging failures. Because high availability aims for automatic, rapid protection against failures, manual failover alone does not align with common HA strategies.

Thus, manual failover only is not a typical strategy for achieving high availability in FOSSE.