WSO2 ESB endoints

Question

Currently our company uses tomcat app server to hold multiple different web-services in it.

The structure looks like this:

WSO2 ESB server -> Tomcat web-service1 -> target server1 with WSDL endpoint1
                -> Tomcat web-service2 -> target server2 with WSDL endpoint2
                -> Tomcat web-service3 -> target server3 with WSDL endpoint3
                -> Tomcat web-service4 -> target server4 with WSDL endpoint4

etc...

Is this reasonable or should the web-services run directly at the target server if possible?

Or should the web-services run directly at the same server where WSO2 itself lies? What is the best practice for building up the architecture?

Br, M

Answer 1

In my opinion, an ideal way to do this is to make the web services available in several AppServer instance, and make it a clustered environment fronted by WSO2 Load Balancer.

So, you may have several AppServers where each of those hosts all the web services. Clustering makes it possible to communicate each servers to have a consistent state. This provides a solution for Single Point of Failure , and you'll be able design high availablity among others. With a Load Balancer you may direct the traffic to servers based on an algorithm (like Round-Robin).

Clustering Configuration article of WSO2 AppServer 4.1.2 provides some details including a basic architecture diagram.