In PingAM 8.0.2, the term Affinity Mode (or session affinity) is strictly related to Load Balancing (Option B). It describes a configuration where a load balancer ensures that all requests belonging to a specific user session are consistently routed to the same PingAM server instance in a cluster.

According to the 'Load Balancing' and 'Deployment Planning' documentation:

Affinity is critical for performance in stateful deployments. While PingAM can operate in a 'stateless' manner by retrieving sessions from the Core Token Service (CTS) on every request, this creates unnecessary overhead. Affinity Mode allows the AM server to satisfy requests using its local 'In-memory' session cache.

There are two primary levels of affinity discussed in PingAM documentation:

Client-to-AM Affinity: Usually handled by the load balancer using a cookie (like the AMLB cookie) to keep the user on the same AM node.

AM-to-DS Affinity: Used when AM connects to the CTS (PingDS). This ensures that an AM server always talks to the same directory server node to avoid 'replication lag' where a session might be written to one DS node but not yet visible on another.

Without affinity, the system remains functional due to the CTS, but performance decreases as every request requires a cross-network database lookup. Therefore, affinity is a core concept of the Load Balancing and high-availability architecture.