While both Floating IPs and Virtual IPs (VIPs) serve as abstraction layers in networking, they operate with distinct mechanisms:

• Floating IP: A publicly routable IP address that can be dynamically reassigned between instances or nodes, typically used in cloud environments for high availability.
• Virtual IP: An IP address not tied to specific hardware, used to represent multiple servers as a single entity, commonly seen in load balancing scenarios.

Here's a Python example demonstrating how cloud providers might handle Floating IP assignment:

import openstack

conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mycloud')
server = conn.compute.find_server('web-server-01')
floating_ip = conn.network.find_ip('198.51.100.42')

conn.compute.add_floating_ip_to_server(server, floating_ip.ip)

For VIP implementation, consider this HAProxy configuration snippet:

frontend web_frontend
    bind 192.0.2.100:80
    default_backend web_servers

backend web_servers
    server webserver1 192.0.2.101:80 check
    server webserver2 192.0.2.102:80 check

Floating IPs often rely on:

• ARP updates (in traditional networks)
• API calls (in cloud environments)

Virtual IPs typically use:

• TCP connection proxying
• DNS round-robin techniques
• BGP advertisements (in global load balancing)

The failover time differs significantly:

• Floating IP reassignment: Typically 1-30 seconds depending on cloud provider
• VIP failover: Often sub-second when using protocols like VRRP

Here's a VRRP configuration example showing VIP setup:

vrrp_instance VI_1 {
    state MASTER
    interface eth0
    virtual_router_id 51
    priority 100
    advert_int 1
    virtual_ipaddress {
        192.0.2.100/24
    }
}

While both Floating IPs and Virtual IPs (VIPs) represent abstraction layers in networking, they serve fundamentally different purposes:

# Floating IP Example (OpenStack API)
import openstack

conn = openstack.connect(cloud='mycloud')
server = conn.compute.find_server("web-server-1")
floating_ip = conn.network.find_available_ip()
conn.compute.add_floating_ip_to_server(server, floating_ip.floating_ip_address)

VIPs typically operate at these layers:

• Layer 4 (Transport): TCP/UDP port forwarding
• Layer 7 (Application): HTTP/HTTPS content-based routing

# HAProxy VIP configuration example
frontend http-in
    bind 192.168.1.100:80
    default_backend servers

backend servers
    server server1 10.0.0.1:80 check
    server server2 10.0.0.2:80 check

The technical implementations reveal key differences:

# AWS EC2 Floating IP association (AWS CLI)
aws ec2 associate-address \
    --instance-id i-0b263919b7621e117 \
    --public-ip 203.0.113.7

# Keepalived VIP configuration (VRRP)
vrrp_instance VI_1 {
    state MASTER
    interface eth0
    virtual_router_id 51
    priority 100
    virtual_ipaddress {
        192.168.1.100/24
    }
}

Choose Floating IP when:

• Implementing active-passive failover in cloud environments
• Needing to reassign public IPs without DNS changes
• Working with stateful services that can't be load balanced

Opt for Virtual IP when:

• Building highly available services with multiple active nodes
• Implementing load balancing at network layers 4-7
• Requiring transparent failover for clients