---
Title: Proxy-based disaster recovery
alwaysopen: false
categories:
- docs
- operate
- rs
- rc
description: Proxy-based disaster recovery for Active-Active databases.
linkTitle: Proxy-based
weight: 20
---
If you add a lightweight proxy software component between the clients and the Active-Active database, applications can dynamically route requests to the optimal endpoint.
Advantages:
- Proxies provide proactive and reactive health check methods, such as polling target health periodically using either a TCP connection or an HTTP request, or monitoring live operations for errors.
- Proxies can be configured to run Active-Active health checks, such as the lag-aware database availability requests.
- If an Active-Active database member fails, a proxy can automatically detect the issue and redirect traffic to a healthy Active-Active database member without requiring DNS propagation delays or client disconnections. This enables fast, controlled failover and minimizes downtime.
Considerations:
- If you do not use DNS to resolve the Active-Active database members' FQDNs:
- The proxies must have static IPs.
- If you add a new node to the cluster, you must configure the proxy with the new endpoint.
- A configuration syncer component is required to discover topology changes and reconfigure the proxy.
- Proxies introduce latency.
- Proxy failures can disconnect clients and cause disruptions.
## Avoid concurrent access across replicas
If concurrent access across replicas must be avoided in every scenario, you can use a centralized proxy with a standby proxy instance for high availability.
Advantages:
- Prevents concurrent access across replicas.
- Failover and failback are simultaneous regardless of the Active-Active health check policy.
Considerations:
- Although the proxy can be monitored with a watchdog and restarted in case of failure, this setup does not grant high availability for the proxy.
- Limited scalability.
The following diagram shows a centralized proxy architecture with a standby proxy instance:
## Co-locate to reduce latency and improve scalability
To reduce latency and improve scalability, you can use a proxy co-located in the application server.
Advantages:
- Reduced latency.
- Better scalability.
Considerations:
- Failover and failback might not be simultaneous depending on the Active-Active health check policy.
The following diagram shows a co-located proxy architecture where each application server has its own proxy:
## Pool proxies for scalability
You can use a pool of active proxies to scale the routing layer. Application servers can balance new connections to the pool of proxies using a round-robin distribution algorithm, such as DNS-based round robin.
Advantages:
- High availability without complex monitoring and failover solutions.
- Flexible scalability of the routing layer.
Considerations:
- Concurrent access across replicas is possible, but can be mitigated using database availability API requests.
The following diagram shows a pool of proxies:
