Computer clusters, especially Kubernetes clusters, have seen a significant uptick in adoption over the past decade. Startups and tech giants alike are leveraging cluster-based architectures to deploy and manage their applications in the cloud. But what is a cluster?What is the relationship between a cluster and a container?Why might you want to consider using a cluster to host your own applications?
At a high level, a computer cluster is a set of two or more computers or nodes that run in parallel to achieve a common goal. This enables workloads consisting of a large number of separate, parallelizable tasks to be distributed across nodes in the cluster. As a result, these tasks can take advantage of each computer's combined memory and processing power to improve overall performance.
To build a computer cluster, individual nodes should be connected to the network for inter-node communication. The nodes can then be connected together and form a cluster using computer clustering software. It can have shared storage devices and or local storage on each node. Typically, at least one node is designated as the leader node and acts as an entry point to the cluster. The leader node can be responsible for delegating the incoming work to other nodes and, if needed, aggregate the results and return a response to the user.
Ideally, a cluster would function as a single system. Users accessing a cluster do not need to know whether the system is a cluster or a single machine. In addition, the cluster should be designed to minimize latency and prevent bottlenecks in inter-node communication.
Computer clusters can generally be divided into three types:
High availability or failover.
Load balancing. High-performance computing.
These three types of clusters are closely related to the potential benefits that clusters offer. Clusters can be more than one of these three types. For example, a cluster that hosts a web server might be both a highly available cluster and a load-balanced cluster.
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