A key to maintaining a highly available network is building in the appropriate redundancy to protect against failure. This redundancy is carefully balanced with the inherent complexity of redundant sy

The 'design for failure' principle mandates that architects assume outages and security incidents will happen and build in redundant paths, failover mechanisms, and threat mitigations from the start - this proactive stance ensures the network continues operating under adverse conditions rather than depending on perfect uptime.

Simple and centralized management improves operational efficiency but does not directly address resiliency - a centralized management plane can itself become a single point of failure if not independently protected.

Simplifying deployment reduces provisioning complexity and human error but does not ensure the network can withstand link failures, device failures, or attacks, which is the core definition of resiliency.

Automation tools enhance visibility and accelerate incident response but are a secondary operational capability; they do not replace the architectural decision to build redundancy and expect failures.