Clusterbinding

Clusterbinding is a term used in distributed and cloud computing to describe the mechanism by which resources, services, or processes are bound to a cluster of machines. It covers the association between logical services and the physical or virtual nodes that comprise a cluster, enabling coordinated management, routing, state replication, and failover across the cluster.

Bindings can be static or dynamic. Static bindings are fixed at deployment time, while dynamic bindings adjust as nodes join or leave the cluster, updating routing and resource allocation accordingly. Bindings can target service endpoints, data partitions, configuration data, or stateful resources such as caches or databases.

Implementation approaches vary by domain. Service discovery tools such as etcd, Consul, or Apache Zookeeper, cluster orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or Hadoop YARN, and DNS-based methods are commonly used to publish and locate bound resources. Network techniques include virtual IPs, load balancers, and API-level routing that respects the binding.

Benefits of clusterbinding include improved availability, scalability, and consistency in access to resources. It supports failover, rolling updates, and coordinated policy enforcement across a cluster, but it introduces complexity around membership management, latency, and potential for split-brain scenarios if coordination is imperfect.

See also clustering, service discovery, load balancing, high availability, distributed systems.