Load Balancing and Sticky Sessions

[Cantor, Scott]

On 8/26/13 6:24 PM, "Brian Reindel" <brian at reindel.com> wrote:

>Well, I can only tell you how we manage our environment, but I
>couldn't tell you if we're a fringe case or not. We already put a
>significant amount of financing and resources behind our database
>(Oracle Enterprise), and so we readily accept it as our single point
>of failure.

Ok. What I really mean by that is not "will it be reliable?" but "how can
you patch without downtime?"

> It is both highly transactional and a warehouse and both
>tiers are clustered to my knowledge.

Of course, if the database is clustered, then my question is answered.
That turns out to be really, really rare (RAC costs a *lot*).

>This is because we want everything to be stateless. Any new service
>based applications we build will follow a similar pattern. Which
>brings me to the IdP. We don't want to go through all of the effort to
>make all future applications stateless, only to require sticky
>sessions for SSO.

Then my suggestion would be to look into my contributed login handler and
the other plugins (see the StatelessClustering page I wrote up).

>Our goal is to start/stop/balance/cluster with little to no
>interruption to the end users. The best way I feel to do that is to
>move toward complete statelessness.

Agreed. If you can live without the features you have to give up (such as
logout that doesn't work anyway) then you can get the IdP totally
stateless today.

Thank you for taking the time,
-- Scott