This recipe guides you through the process of setting up a MySQL cluster. Clustered databases meet the challenges of scalability and high-availability by partitioning the data across multiple systems and maintaining replicas to avoid single points of failure.

The members of a cluster are referred to as nodes. There are three node types in a MySQL cluster: data nodes, API nodes, and the management node. Data nodes are responsible for storing data. Users and processes then connect to an API node to access the database. The management node manages the cluster as a whole. Although multiple nodes can be installed on the same system, for example, both an API node and a data node may be hosted on the same system. However, hosting multiple data nodes on the same system is obviously not a good idea because it negates MySQL's efforts to distribute the data.