As someone who came to Trino from the Hadoop world, this was my first question, too, given that Hadoop had an active/passive HA model for the NameNode and the ResourceManager that worked pretty well. Neither of us are unique in this question and there are several such instances here on this forums site such as at Can you set up Trino in HA mode?.
Fundamentally, Trino itself does NOT have a HA solution for the coordinator. Various teams and customers have implemented solutions over the years such as described in Trino | 33: Trino becomes highly available for high demand. At the end of it all, many of these solutions lean on a model of routing to 2+ full clusters to create the HA solution when one is not available. Not a bad answer considering you get additional benefits along with it such as query routing and blue/green deployments for zero-downtime upgrades.
In open-source Trino, that answer is the Trino Gateway – Overview - Trino Gateway.
I should pause for a moment and state that Starburst Professional Services does have a coordinator HA solution on K8s that has been acceptable by many customers.
But, let’s get back to the gateway/routing model as it is the long-term “official” answer from Starburst for HA/DR. While the name is similar, the Starburst Gateway – Starburst Gateway — Starburst Enterprise, is different from the Trino Gateway and again, the “official” go-forward answer to address this need.
Note: as of Sept 2025, the Starburst Gateway is in ‘private preview’, and the product team is always looking for teams who are interested in getting involved.