Final answer:
Clustering involves a group of servers working together for high availability and failover, while load balancing distributes traffic across servers to prevent overload and improve performance. Both are essential for reliable and efficient operation of customer-hosted runtime environments.
Step-by-step explanation:
The differences between clustering and load balancing in a customer-hosted runtime plane are important to understand as they are both strategies used to handle web traffic and ensure high availability of services, but they operate in different manners.
Clustering refers to a set of servers that work together to act as a single system. Clustering provides high availability and failover capabilities by ensuring that if one server in the cluster fails, another server can take over the workload. This is often used for services that require a high level of uptime and data integrity.
On the other hand, load balancing is a technique used to distribute network or application traffic across multiple servers in a network. The main goal of load balancing is to prevent any single server from getting overwhelmed by requests, thereby improving the responsiveness and availability of applications. Load balancers can use various methods to distribute traffic, like round-robin, least connections, or IP hash strategies.
In summary, clustering is about redundancy and failover, while load balancing is about efficiently distributing incoming network traffic among available servers. Both of them work in tandem to improve reliability and performance of customer-hosted runtime environments.