... server.¹

A load-balancing DNS server typically keeps records of the load on all the machines in the cluster. Users do not connect to a specific machine, but a generic alias representing the cluster. Each time a client attempts to resolve the cluster name into an IP address, the DNS server dynamically resolves it to whichever machine has the lowest load.

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... locally.²

This is usually but not always true. In some cases where there is a potential for concurrency, filesystem requests are serialized through the process' home machine to ensure consistency.

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