In this chapter we present some commonly used system architectures for Galera Cluster. From the Understanding Galera chapter you should already be familiar with the concepts of primary component, quorum and resulting need for at minimum 3 nodes. (However, we also consider the special case when you only have 2 nodes available, and your options at dealing with that.)
Most commonly Galera is used with some load balancer. Often the load balancer functionality can even be built into your MySQL client library - this is currently the case with the official JDBC and PHP MySQL clients. However, we also cover some architectures where a load balancer is not used.
Galera has been found to perform very well also when used over Wider Area Networks, even across contintents. Using Galera over WAN is also covered here.
.seealso:: Load balancers
TODO: subsections (toctree)