HashiCorp Vault — High Availability
Production Vault requires high availability to ensure secrets are always accessible. This chapter covers HA architecture, Raft consensus, auto-unseal, and disaster recovery.
What’s in This Chapter?
| # | Topic | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | HA Architecture | Leader election, standby nodes |
| 2 | Raft Storage | Integrated storage with Raft consensus |
| 3 | Auto-Unseal | Cloud KMS-based automatic unsealing |
| 4 | Performance Replication | Multi-datacenter read scaling |
| 5 | Disaster Recovery | DR replication and failover |
| 6 | Practice Exercises | 5 hands-on exercises |
Why HA?
| Single Node | HA Cluster |
|---|---|
| Single point of failure | No SPOF — automatic failover |
| Downtime during upgrades | Rolling upgrades possible |
| One datacenter only | Multi-datacenter with replication |
| Manual unseal after restart | Auto-unseal with cloud KMS |
| No read scaling | Performance standbys serve reads |
HA Overview
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Vault HA Cluster │
│ │
│ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ │
│ │ Node 1 │ │ Node 2 │ │ Node 3 │ │
│ │ (Active) │ │(Standby) │ │(Standby) │ │
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │
│ │ Reads ✅ │ │ Reads ✅ │ │ Reads ✅ │ │
│ │ Writes ✅│ │ Forward │ │ Forward │ │
│ └─────┬────┘ └─────┬────┘ └─────┬────┘ │
│ │ │ │ │
│ └──────────────┼──────────────┘ │
│ │ │
│ Raft Consensus │
│ (Integrated Storage) │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Chapter Flow
Start with HA Architecture to understand leader election and standby behavior.
Next: HA Architecture
