What is the Approov Failover Service?
The Approov failover service is an independent, secondary system designed to keep mobile apps receiving valid Approov tokens in the rare instance if the primary Approov service becomes unavailable.
Approov failover at a glance
- Hosted in a separate cloud: The failover service runs in Google Cloud, providing isolation from a large-scale AWS failure.
- Uses a different domain and top-level domain: This reduces shared dependencies between the primary and failover systems.
- Activates automatically: The failover service checks the primary system minute by minute and enables itself when a primary failure is detected.
- Requires no customer action: The SDK handles the switch automatically. No app update or configuration change is needed.
- Continues issuing valid Approov tokens: The failover service provides a focused subset of the primary service’s analysis capabilities, allowing protected apps to continue operating during a major primary-service failure.
Do customers need to configure failover?
No additional Approov configuration is required. Failover support is built into the Approov SDK and operates automatically.
Organizations that use outbound allowlists, egress proxies or TLS inspection should ensure that every Approov destination used by the SDK is accessible without TLS interception. The account-specific list can be obtained with:
approov sdk -accessedURLs
This helps ensure that network controls do not unintentionally block the secondary service.
Built for continuity
The failover service is part of Approov’s layered approach to availability. It complements the multi-AZ resilience and automatic scaling of the primary AWS service with an independently hosted cross-cloud alternative.
The result is a service designed to keep issuing Approov tokens even during a catastrophic failure of the primary infrastructure, without requiring customers to intervene.
For the complete technical description, see Cloud Server Redundancy in the Approov documentation.