CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicescookiesconfigurationserverload-balancing
Tania Rascia
Tania Rascia

Reputation: 1773

Application-Controlled Session Stickiness: enable stickiness on all cookies?

I have my production servers running behind a load balancer on AWS (they scale up based on an AMI). Some websites have cookies - for example, a restaurant with multiple locations, and each location is set in a cookie.

I noticed that a cookie wasn't being saved across multiple servers, so I remedied this by going into Load Balancers -> Port Configuration, clicking Enable Application Generated Cookie Stickiness, and inserting the name of the cookie.

As far as I know, this only allows one cookie name, and I have many - Google Analytics, for example. (Perhaps they can be comma separated, I haven't checked yet.)

My port configuration now looks like this:

80 (HTTP) forwarding to 80 (HTTP)
Stickiness: AppCookieStickinessPolicy, cookieName='MY_COOKIE'

I was wondering if there was any way to allow ANY app generated cookie to be recognized, instead of having to name them individually.

Any input greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3397

Answers (1)

chris
chris

Reputation: 37440

I think you're misunderstanding the use and purpose of session stickiness.

If you don't have a shared session store - i.e. memcached, redis, or something that is available to ALL instances in your pool, then you're probably using a session mechanism that involves local storage - saving them on a local file system is a common mechanism for php, while IIS will usually have a local session store.

If you're using a local session store, then you need to make sure that all subsequent request come back to the node that has the session stored - because if it doesn't, then whatever information your application has saved in session is no longer available.

To do this, you have two choices: allow the ELB to set and manage the session affinity cookie, or have it do it based on the session cookie you set. Note that in both cases, the ELB will create a new cookie with the name AWSELB and a value that allows it to map the request to the instance that original created it - but if you tie it to the session cookie set when the ELB only generates the AWSELB cookie when it sees a new session cookie.

It sounds like the application problem could be because you're pulling the location from session, not from the cookie, but that's just a guess.

Upvotes: 5

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