Management of Multi-Channel Multi-Container Web Application Servers

摘要

We describe a new configuration management system for a Multi-Container Web server that allows the division of a single web request into independent portions to be executed in parallel over different communication channels. To achieve this, the underlying communication infrastructure of traditional web environments is changed from the state-full TCP to the stateless UDP communication protocol. Such an architectural change provided an environment suitable for parallelization and distribution and enhanced some other already existing characteristics of the current web environments such as fault tolerance and web caching. The target applications that would benefit from such environment are web applications that require intensive processing with respect to data transfer, and which are decomposable by nature;such application profiles demonstrate high gain in performance by the multichannel architecture over the traditional one. The configuration Manager is the subsystem that is responsible for reading configuration files provided by administrator. We will refer to the Configuration Manager through out this paper as the CM. The CM is split into two parts, which are the Container CM and the HPA CM. After the CM reads the necessary configuration files and validates its content, its stores these configurations constructs into data structures buffers for use by other subsystems through internal predefined APIs. The CM makes it easy for administrators to be able to change environment setting such as container port ranges, types of nodes, services names, services location, number of instances each service should be loaded, and more. The CM also have the capability to reconstruct some types of configuration files from its data structure buffers, as such buffers may change through other subsystems and such changes may need to be permanent.