Which system works is the best?

Question

I have an application that runs under 16 Weblogic instances, distributed on 4 servers.

On top of that, I have 2 Apache servers, that are communicating with the application servers.

And on top of that, I have a load balancing system (CSS card, that is going to be replaced by another type of card - ACE card-).

This works fine.

But my company would like to get rid of the 2 Apache Servers, and integrate one IIS instance which will communicate with one Weblogic instance.

So basically, I'll have:

• 16 IIS instances, speaking with 16 Weblogic instances, with a 1-1 relationship.

Personally, I'm very skeptical about this architecture, because:

• what could happen if a Weblogic instance goes down ? I mean, the IIS instance still continues to receive requests from the load balancing system. I know that the new load balancing system can first send a request to see if the application is responding, and if so, it will let the request go further. But, I can imagine that this is taking quite a lot of time, and it's not good for performance.

• Moreover, if the application is responding (meaning Weblogic is UP and running), but this time, IIS is not, the load balancing system will send the request to an IIS instance that is down. So users will have to wait forever!

Do you see other benefits or big drawbacks of this new solution that I may have missed? Is it a good architecture solution?

Answer 1

This works fine.

It's the best solution then.

Your problem statement does not indicate the drivers for the change. Instead, it simply analyzes a solution (for an unclear problem). One cannot determine if a solution would be good or bad without knowing the drivers that form it.