How to use Placement Groups to achieve high availability

Deploying a resilient Redpanda cluster within a single AWS Availability Zone (AZ) can be efficiently achieved by leveraging AWS's Placement Groups and Redpanda's rack awareness feature, which helps distribute virtual machine instances across multiple failure domains to minimize correlated failures. Using partitioned Placement Groups, EC2 instances are spread across partitions, each isolated from hardware failures, thus enhancing high availability (HA) without the added complexity and cost of multi-AZ deployments. The deployment can be automated with Terraform and Ansible scripts to provision and configure Redpanda clusters, ensuring that each broker node is assigned a unique rack ID, corresponding to different partitions within the Placement Group. This setup reduces latency and networking costs while maintaining resilience by ensuring no single point of failure exists within the AZ. Although originally an AWS concept, similar fault domain strategies are also available in other cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which offer equivalent services to manage instance placements. As part of a broader series, this discussion sets the stage for future explorations of highly available clusters spanning multiple AZs and regions, promising even greater resilience.

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