Redundancy and failover design in SCADA systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Redundancy and Failover Design in SCADA Systems

📖 Scenario: You are working with a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system that monitors and controls industrial processes. To ensure the system stays online even if one server fails, you need to design a simple redundancy and failover setup.This project will guide you through creating a basic data structure to represent primary and backup servers, configuring a failover threshold, implementing logic to switch to backup when the primary fails, and displaying the active server.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple redundancy and failover design for a SCADA system using a dictionary to hold server statuses, a failover threshold, logic to detect failure and switch servers, and output the currently active server.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called servers with keys 'primary' and 'backup' and their status as values ('online' or 'offline')

Create a variable called failover_threshold set to 1

Write logic to check if the primary server is offline and switch to backup if so

Print the name of the active server after failover logic

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

SCADA systems control critical infrastructure like power plants and factories. Redundancy and failover ensure these systems keep running even if one server fails.

💼 Career

Understanding redundancy and failover is essential for DevOps engineers working with industrial control systems to maintain high availability and reliability.

1

Setup server status dictionary

Create a dictionary called servers with these exact entries: 'primary': 'online' and 'backup': 'offline'.

SCADA systems

# Create the servers dictionary with primary and backup statuses
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with keys 'primary' and 'backup' and their statuses as values.

2

Set failover threshold

Create a variable called failover_threshold and set it to 1.

SCADA systems

servers = {'primary': 'online', 'backup': 'offline'}
# Set the failover_threshold variable to 1
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 1 to the variable failover_threshold.

3

Implement failover logic

Write an if statement that checks if servers['primary'] is equal to 'offline'. If true, set a variable called active_server to 'backup'. Otherwise, set active_server to 'primary'.

SCADA systems

servers = {'primary': 'online', 'backup': 'offline'}
failover_threshold = 1
# Add failover logic to set active_server
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use an if-else statement to check the primary server status and assign active_server accordingly.

4

Display active server

Write a print statement to display the text "Active server: " followed by the value of active_server.

SCADA systems

servers = {'primary': 'online', 'backup': 'offline'}
failover_threshold = 1
if servers['primary'] == 'offline':
    active_server = 'backup'
else:
    active_server = 'primary'
# Print the active server
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print() to show the active server with the exact text format.