There's a mantra about the importance of redundancy that originated a long time ago in the military but applies in many contexts, including system and network administration.
"Two is one, and one is none." 🖥️ 🖥️
It's the design concept of the Internet itself—when it was still called "ARPANET". The idea was that in the event of a nuclear strike where a large part of the country was wiped off the face of the Earth, surviving systems and 'inter-networks' in other geographical regions would still be able to communicate with each other with little or no manual reconfiguration.
Resilience in the wake of failure was the goal, communication was to be ensured at all costs.
RAID, failover WAN, BGP (and TCP/IP routing in general), server clustering all mitigate downtime in the event of failure of a single component (or even scheduled maintenance where pieces must be taken offline).
It's a practice that I won't say I'm *obsessed* over, but I absolutely enjoy employing it wherever I can, even if it seems overkill. ✅ 💙 😎 Call it my inner-prepper, I dunno 😂
#internet #sysadmin #networking #redundancy #arpanet #tcpip