The need for balancing
Placing a web server as a front door to your application server is a common practice that can provide the following benefits:
- Load balancing and clustering: By using a web server as a frontend you can handle traffic in multiple backend server instances. If one of your backend servers fails, the communication transparently continues to another node in the cluster.
- Speed: You can improve the performance by serving static content from your web server, which generally uses the native API.
- Security: The application server, where sensitive data is stored, can be placed in a protected area while exposing the frontend to an untrusted network. Essentially, you need to secure only the frontend, which normally does not contain business code.
The list of available software solutions for balancing JBoss EAP has grown in the last few years as new tools or software have been released whilst new balancing functionalities have been added into the application server. We can broadly divide...
