It's worth pointing that "MySQL Cluster" is actually a different product[1] and not what is used in the article (Innodb Cluster or Group Replication).<p>[1]: <a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-cluster-overview.htmlhttps://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-cluster-overview.html" rel="nofollow">https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/mysql-cluster-overvi...</a>
<i>"To cut the story short, I had to accept that there is nothing I can do with the networking issues and there are likely to be significant “bursts” of dropped packets that will cause disconnection of our MySQL8 cluster nodes.<p>So we know there is very likely an infrastructure problem. The question is, can we mitigate it on the application layer?"</i><p>That seems unwise. It's on DigitalOcean, so they could have migrated to different VPS instances and checked to see if the problem followed.
MySQL evangelist here ;-), for any cluster/HA solution relying on multiple machines linked by a network, if you can't rely on the network, it's very complicated to rely on the solution. This is valid for MySQL InnoDB Cluster but for any other quorum based solution.
The third point of the requirements is Network Performance (<a href="https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-replication-requirements.html" rel="nofollow">https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-replication-re...</a>) maybe we should add "and Reliability"
Of course as you may have noticed, 8.0.16 already brings new features helping with a flaky network and even if we will never encourage people to deploy MySQL InnoDB Cluster (Group Replication) on a bad network, we are constantly working on improving the user experience even on such environment.