What are the Benefits of Cluster Architecture?
21.02.2020
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The primary goal of any web application or service is to render high-quality performance and meet the expectations of its customers. It is possible that a web application may receive millions of requests per second and hence, it is not practically possible for a single system to respond to each of these incoming requests. This is precisely where a cluster architecture plays a vital role. Put simply; it is a system of interconnected nodes that cooperate with each other in sharing their workload.
For example, there is a web application, and it is supported by a group of servers to handle the incoming requests. This group of servers not only helps a web application in efficiently balancing the overall load but also increases redundancy in case if one of the servers in the group fails or breaks down. Especially for e-commerce web applications that require high performance with minimal downtime, server clustering ensures that the supporting infrastructure is working as needed even if one or more servers in the cluster are down.
Some of the most common types of clusters include failover (high availability) clusters, load balancing clusters, and high-performance clusters.
A failover cluster replicates existing servers and redundant hardware and software reconfiguration to increase service availability. Every constituent system is continuously monitoring the other so that if one node fails, the request is dealt with by other nodes. Such clusters are generally used by users with a high dependency on computer systems such as news websites, e-commerce businesses, etc.
Specifically used in complex scientific applications, high-performance clusters run parallel programs for time-exhaustive calculations. By intelligently sharing the workload among the connected nodes, high-performance clusters are able to increase performance significantly. Other industries relying on high-performance clusters include graphics and video processing industry, augmented and virtual reality, etc.
As the name clearly suggests, load balancing clusters distribute loads among the constituent servers for providing increased network capacity. Since the nodes are integrated, the incoming requests are evenly distributed across the connected nodes. However, it must not be interpreted that the entire system is working together; instead, the incoming requests are evenly distributed as they arrive. Load balancing clusters are preferred by e-commerce businesses and internet service providers for managing a large number of user requests, while at the same time, maintaining a satisfactory level of performance.
In order to provide our clients with state of the art SIEM and SOAR services, Logsign is supported by a mixed cluster architecture at the backend to support easier scalability, extended availability, efficient load balancing, effective self-healing, and necessary redundancy.
Depending upon the network size, Logsign can be either installed on a single cloud and a physical server, or on multiple servers at once. Logsign’s constituent services are operated as an active-active cluster. These services are delivered through various servers for meeting performance expectations and optimized conditions. Logisign’s cluster architecture allows horizontal as well as vertical stability.
By utilizing Logsign’s cluster architecture, the received data clones are available on multiple servers. If one or more than one servers are damaged, the rest of the servers keep operating efficiently as if nothing has happened.
Further, we block direct access from untrusted/unverified users in order to protect our clustered architecture from unexpected user behavior. With clustered architecture in place, security measures like demilitarized zone (DMZ) and firewalls are also implemented. The feature set for our scalable cluster infrastructure consists of:
