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What is the definition of a cluster?
Published:
A Cluster is simply a collection of Servers and related resources acting as one unit using a controller such as Kubernetes.
Advantages
- Clusters offer excellent licensing flexibility in that you do not have to worry about deploying at scale.
- As your application scales using a single cluster (by adding more nodes), you do not pay additional licensing fees.
- This is in direct contrast to licensing models that license by users, CPUs, data stored, memory, container count etc.
Example scenarios
For instance consider the following examples.
| Description | Considered as how many clusters for licensing? |
| Running an application on a Kubernetes cluster with a master node and several worker nodes - self-hosted, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. | 1 |
| Running an application as a single Azure web app with scaling to several virtual machines. | 1 |
| Running an application on a single server (bare metal, VM etc). | 1 |
| Running an application using several Docker containers managed as one unit | 1 |
| Running an application using two separate Kubernetes clusters - for instance one to cover North America and another to cover Asia. | 2 |
| Running an application in production on a Kubernetes cluster. In addition using another cluster for testing. | 1 (testing cluster does not count for licensing) |
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DJ
