Clustering system allows a single installation to serve a much greater number of concurrent requests than a single server. This is what we refer to as 'scaling under load'.
It does provide a certain amount of resilience, as the death of one node won't bring the other(s) down. However, it requires very low network latency, which rules out geographic separation of the servers, and upgrading can only be performed while the entire cluster is shut down. This doesn't mean that Confluence's clustering is buggy or broken. It simply reflects the difference between the two design aims.
