Matrix42 Application Server Clustering

Overview 

Application clustering (or software clustering) is a technique to empower the entire system to distribute compute capabilities between two or more servers that altogether act as a single system. The software gets installed in each of the servers in the group, also known as cluster or farm. The created multi-server infrastructure is aimed to collectively process continual flow of user requests, perform routine application operations, collect and process the data. Being controlled by load balancing software, each of the servers (aka nodes) in the cluster allocates its resources (CPU, RAM, hardware, etc.) to process incoming requests and generate responses, determine failures and execute failover duty.  

Application clustering stands behind the Matrix42 Software Cloud Transformation strategy and is intended to significantly improve user experience. There are the following core benefits to gain from the clustering: 

• Scalability (or load balancing) 
  By distributing processing, the Matrix42 Software becomes horizontally scalable software that allows to leverage resources more effectively, i.e., multiple user sessions are getting processed simultaneously on different servers (depending on the loading of each). Thus, the application becomes more responsive, it can handle more users, execute more tasks, process more data without significant performance degradation. 

• Fail-over (or high availability) 
  Fail-over stands for fewer and shorter service interruptions. Running the application in a cluster in the nature of the case leads the Matrix42 Software to crucially increase availability percentage. Therefore, the downtime or outage of one single node is possible but does not affect the entire system availability. The cluster balancing mechanism encircles the rest of the available nodes by excluding the fallen ones. Thus, the clustering approach provides more conveniences to maintain the existing system without any interruptions sensitive to end-users. 

• Solving Latency issues
  The latency of a network is the time it takes for a data packet to be transferred from its source to the destination. Also known as lag, the problem of high latency is becoming more common as networks are growing bigger.

The following diagram provides more clarity on how the Matrix42 Software evolves from a single server setup and scales out to a clustered multi-server environment: 

To have Matrix42 Software installed and run successfully in the cluster, a set of steps must be taken and performed accordingly. It will require an extra environment for the basic configuration of Load Balancer and one or additional servers for Matrix42 instances.

Use cases

Useful Information

Follow the links below to learn more about the Load Balancer: