Scaling for possible SaaS application

michaelappdev

How could I scale a single Business Space to take advantage of Cloud computing like Amazon or Google's offerings?

How could I route traffic appropriately to multiple application/ database servers?

Most importantly, HOW does Aware IM scale... technically?

aware_support

Aware IM uses a 3 tier architecture like many enterprise-grade systems:

Browser --> Web Server --> Application Server ---> Database Server

You can easily scale your database servers. If you are using MySQL or SQL Server or Oracle this can be done by the database engine. You can also scale web servers and route client requests to different web servers.

This topic is huge and the detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this thread. Please ask more questions if necessary.

michaelappdev

If I scale the web servers, that still doesn't answer how I scale the application servers. For instance, I want to be able to handle a large load of traffic on a single Aware IM app. How do I get Aware IM to run on multiple boxes and balance load?

I guess I need a better explanation of the application server layer. Obviously I would not build Facebook in Aware IM but I need to know if Aware IM can be scaled out to potentially manage such a theoretical load.

aware_support

You can scale it like this:

Web Server --> App Server -
\
\
Web Server --> App Server --> DB Server (with mirroring and replication)
/
/
Web Server --> App Server -

Load balancing should be done using OS

michaelappdev

So could Aware IM be thrown onto the Amazon cloud (AWS)? If so, how would you do that?

Is there any Aware IM documentation that describes scaling step by step?

aware_support

There is no documentation that describes scaling, but Aware IM is a typical J2EE application using Tomcat as web application deployment engine. If you are familiar with these standard technologies you should be able to do the necessary manipulations (we can help if necessary)

michaelappdev

Are there any resources that you could point us to?

aware_support

Please refer to the Tomcat documentation - in particular, how it manages web applications. Aware IM uses Tomcat 5.5