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CompTIA Security+ 3.4
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Load Balancing or Clustering?

Load balancing or clustering? Sort each part of the system. Land five in a row.

⚑ Complete this interactive to capture a CTF flag worth 5 points.

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.

What you'll learn

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+
3.4 Explain the importance of resilience and recovery in security architecture.

Key terms

Load Balancer
A device or software that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure availability and performance.
Clustering
A configuration where multiple servers or nodes work together as a single logical system to provide high availability, load balancing, or both, so that service continues if one node fails.
Availability
The assurance that systems and data are accessible and operational when needed by authorized users.
Scalability
The ability of a system to handle increased load by adding resources without degrading performance.

Topics

Interactive Streak Sort

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