Mechanisms are provided for performing a failover operation of an application from a faulty node of a high availability cluster to a selected target node. The mechanisms receive a notification of an imminent failure of the faulty node. The mechanisms further receive health information from nodes of a local failover scope of a failover policy associated with the faulty node. Moreover, the mechanisms dynamically modify the failover policy based on the health information from the nodes of the local failover scope and select a node from the modified failover policy as a target node for failover of an application running on the faulty node to the target node. Additionally, the mechanisms perform failover of the application to the target node based on the selection of the node from the modified failover policy.