This chapter will cover WildFly's clustering capabilities. The term cluster is used to describe a system split over several machines. Having the components of a system synchronize over multiple machines generally improves performance and availability.

Clustering serves as an essential component to providing scalability and high availability to your applications. One major benefit of using clustering is that you can spread the traffic load across several AS instances via load balancing.

Load balancing is an orthogonal aspect of your enterprise application and is generally achieved by using a properly configured web server in front of the application server. For this reason, load balancing is discussed in the next chapter while, in this chapter, we will discuss the following topics: