About this interactive
Clustering happens on a service. Servers work together to deliver it, sharing resources, configuration and data, so they act as one. Database services are very commonly clustered, and failover between the nodes is part of it.
Load balancing puts a load balancer between the clients and the servers and shares the connections out among them. More often than not it deals with network traffic.
Both add performance, availability and scalability, but the lesson puts it this way: clustering leans toward availability, load balancing toward performance.
They are often used together, and each is used alone: a clustered database fails over by moving its IP address or a DNS record with no balancer at all, and non-clustered apps sit behind a load balancer with their sessions kept elsewhere.
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