Architectural overview

As we have seen, there are a few different types of deployment we could use; which one you choose really depends on your application's make-up. Each has a number of trade-offs, but most deployments tend to use one of the first two, with the client and server cluster approach the usual favorite unless we have a mostly compute-focused application where the former is a simpler setup.

So, let's have a look at the various architectural setups that we can employ and what situations they are best suited to.

Peer-to-peer clusters

This is the standard example that we have been mostly using until now: each node houses both our application and the data persistence and processing. It is most useful when we have an application that is primarily focused towards asynchronous or high-performance computing and executes a lot of tasks on the cluster. The greatest drawback is the inability to scale our application and data capacity separately.

Smart clients and server clusters

This is a more...