Clustering
F5® Distributed Cloud App Stack provides a scale-out infrastructure services layer that can be deployed across heterogeneous private/public, network and edge infrastructure. The scale-out infrastructure services layer provides a consistent workflow to scale-out customer sites across heterogeneous environments. A key component of the scale-out infrastructure services layer is clustering. F5 Distributed Cloud nodes can be clustered together in active-active fashion to scale out resources (compute and storage) on-demand, making infrastructure flexible and elastic. Applications can be deployed across any node in the cluster immediately after the node is added to the cluster. Clustering can be visualized simply as shown in the diagram below.
App Stack Clustering
Clustering Features
The process of clustering nodes is zero-touch and can be done remotely during the provisioning of new nodes. To begin the process of scaling out, the user first checks the resource load on each node using the site dashboard to decide if scale-out is required. Once the user determines a scale-out is required the user begins provisioning the new node. During the provisioning process of a new node, the user can decide if they want to add the new node to an existing cluster or provision the new node as a separate cluster. As soon as the new node is added to the cluster, new applications could be deployed onto this new node, thereby availing of the increased resources.
Concepts
The following concepts are used by Clustering features. Click on each one to learn more: