Apps? Instances? Nodes? Cluster? – What does that mean?

FlashDrive is a highly reliable, high-availability, load-balanced cluster.

To simplify it, FlashDrive is a network of computers connected inside a data center, which serves the content hosted on the FlashDrive network.

Inside the FlashDrive platform, you will find these recurring words:

  • App – This refers to any of the services that you launch on the FlashDrive cluster. It can be a website, a data store (like a database), or a script worker.
  • Instances – these are the virtual machines that run your app inside the cluster. Think of it as a virtual computer with power allocated to your app (dedicated to some specific instance sizes) from the cluster’s total power capacity.
  • Nodes are the physical server members of the cluster. Nodes host the virtual instances that host your apps on FlashDrive. 
  • Finally, the ‘Cluster’ is the complete infrastructure of this whole process. It is responsible for making everything work.

When you create an App (for example, a static HTML website), you will run this website on a number of ‘instances’ that you have allocated (from 1 to 10). These instances are placed strategically on nodes inside the ‘cluster,’ which ensures that your app is always available. So, even if a node fails, your app will still run. If your app runs on only one instance, and that node fails, the ‘cluster’ will automatically move your ‘instance’ to another node and still keep your service alive.

With FlashDrive, you don’t have to worry about the ‘cluster’ and ‘nodes.’ All you need to do is select the size and number of instances that will run your app. Additionally, you can always scale your app up or down, adding more ‘instances’ or resizing the ones you have to absorb peak loads or traffic increases.

With time, you will be able to decide how your app can scale vertically, setting a maximum number of instances each app can run and letting FlashDrive adapt the number of live ‘instances’ to meet your app’s demand in real-time.

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