Should cluster support be at the application or framework level?

Question

Lets say you're starting a new web project that required the website to run on and MVC framework on Mono. A couple major requirements are that it has to scale easy, be stable and work with multiple servers that may or may not be in the same place or even on the same local network.

The first thing I thought of was a sort of cluster communication between servers. Each server would act as a node and be its own standalone application and would query other nodes in a known list for session information and things like that.

But one major design questions I have is should this functionality be built into the supporting framework or should the application handle the synchronization of the data?

Or am I just way off and this would never work?

Answer 1

Normaly clustering rather belongs to some kind of middleware layer, thus on your framework level. However it can also be implemented on the application level.

It depends on your exact use, if you want load balancing, scalability etc.