Embodiments of the disclosure provide systems and methods for performing a rapid failover in a cloud-based service with reduced interruption of ongoing communications. According to embodiments described herein, independent arbitration between servers can be used to indicate to a load balancer which of two or more servers should be considered the active one. This independent arbitration makes better state of health assessments than simple server failure. The load balancer can be explicitly controlled in this case. The health of individual containers, the completeness of the shadowed state as well as server health itself can be factored into the decision to make one server active over the other.