MySQL Cluster is a distributed database that provides extreme scalability, high availability, and real-time performance. It uses an auto-sharding and auto-replicating architecture to distribute data across multiple low-cost servers. Key benefits include scaling reads and writes, 99.999% availability through its shared-nothing design with no single point of failure, and real-time responsiveness. It supports both SQL and NoSQL interfaces to enable complex queries as well as high-performance key-value access.