Cloud Clustering

Cloud Servers are well suited to being deployed as a Cloud Server cluster. Learn what a Cloud Server cluster is, the problems that a Cloud Server cluster can solve, and how clustering a set of Cloud Servers can benefit your project.

• At least two Cloud Servers (any operating system)

The term "cluster" simply means a group of linked servers (which are referred to as "nodes").

Clustering has been a popular solution since the earliest days of mainframe computing. Cloud Computing has brought new interest to the concept of clustering, due to the ease of creating a cluster and adding nodes, combined with the availability and performance demands of modern applications.

Cloud Server clusters can be designed to share workloads, centralize storage, provide fail-over services if one node fails, or isolate services.

Cloud Server clusters can be set up to improve a project's:

Performance

On a single server, one component of a project typically takes up more resources than the others. This can drag down the performance of the entire server. Moving one or more components to separate servers can improve the performance of the entire project.

Scalability

A cluster is easy to scale horizontally. For example, if a web server is at its limit for the amount of traffic it can handle, simply add a second web server and a load balancer.

Reliability

When your entire project is run on a single server, this creates a single point of failure. If that server goes down, the entire project is unavailable.

Clustering allows you to set up secondary servers in order to provide higher availability and increase uptime.

Ease of Maintenance

Performing updates on a cluster can be handled without reducing your project's availability. Depending on the setup, individual nodes in the cluster can be taken offline for maintenance without causing issues for your visitors.

Flexibility

A cluster allows you to add, remove, and change components as much as you need, in order to suit the changing specifications of your project.