MySQL Cluster
MySQL Cluster is a technology providing shared-nothing clustering and auto-sharding for the MySQL database management system. It is designed to provide high availability and high throughput with low latency, while allowing for near linear scalability. MySQL Cluster is implemented through the NDB or NDBCLUSTER storage engine for MySQL ("NDB" stands for Network Database).
Architecture
MySQL Cluster is designed around a distributed, multi-master ACID compliant architecture with no single point of failure. MySQL Cluster uses automatic sharding (partitioning) to scale out read and write operations on commodity hardware and can be accessed via SQL and Non-SQL (NoSQL) APIs
Replication
Internally MySQL Cluster uses synchronous replication through a two-phase commit mechanism in order to guarantee that data is written to multiple nodes upon committing the data. (This is in contrast to what is usually referred to as "MySQL Replication", which is asynchronous.) Two copies (known as replicas) of the data are required to guarantee availability. MySQL Cluster automatically creates “node groups” from the number of replicas and data nodes specified by the user. Updates are synchronously replicated between members of the node group to protect against data loss and support fast failover between nodes.
