title: Difference between pool and cluster
body: <p>From a purest perspective, they kind of feel like identical concepts. Both manage sets of reosurces/nodes and control their access from or by external components.</p>
  
  <p>With a pool, you borrow and return these resources/nodes to and from the pool.</p>
  
  <p>With a cluster, you have a load balancer sitting in front of the resources/nodes and you hit the load balancer with a request.</p>
  
  <p>In both cases you have absolutely no control over which resource/node your request/borrow gets mapped to.</p>
  
  <p>So I pose the question: <strong>what's the fundamental difference between the "pool" pattern and a load-balanced cluster?</strong></p>