All of our examples so far have relied on the standard default cluster discovery process. This uses an IP multicast approach, allowing each new node to interrogate the local network to discover any preexisting clusters, and request to join it should it match an expected configuration. One notable feature of public cloud infrastructures is that they tend to share a common network between multiple customers on their virtualized hardware. To avoid any security concerns, distributed networking capabilities such as multicast tend to be blocked; as such we need another mechanism of cluster discovery.

There are two other ways of configuring a cluster: