When deploying web applications, a common approach is to implement the actual application logic as a series of services and expose them via HTTP, then put some front ends between the services and the users. Typically those front ends will take care of things like SSL, session data, load balancing, routing requests, possibly caching, and so on.
AFAIK, that usually means that every time a new request comes in, one or more new requests must be made to one or more of the backends: each one with its TCP handshake, HTTP overhead, etc.
Doesn't that additional connections add a measurable latency and/or performance hit?
If so, what techniques are in common practice to get the best performance from those kind of deployments?
Latency on a local connection will be minimal - single digit milliseconds at most probably. There will be some occupancy overhead for extra HTTP sessions, but then its spread out among different apps.
The advantage of the approach you describe is that is distributes the load amongst different apps so you can have lots of front-end bits doing heavy lifting like SSL and have fewer backend apps that handle more sessions. And you can pick and mix what apps you need.
A single monolithic app will probably be a bit faster until it runs out of capacity at which point you have a problem because its hard to scale up.
Related
I always read that one reason to chose a RESTful architecture is (among others) better scalability for Webapplications with a high load.
Why is that? One reason I can think of is that because of the defined resources which are the same for every client, caching is made easier. After the first request, subsequent requests are served from a memcached instance which also scales well horizontally.
But couldn't you also accomplish this with a traditional approach where actions are encoded in the url, e.g. (booking.php/userid=123&travelid=456&foobar=789).
A part of REST is indeed the URL part (it's the R in REST) but the S is more important for scaling: state.
The server end of REST is stateless, which means that the server doesn't have to store anything across requests. This means that there doesn't have to be (much) communication between servers, making it horizontally scalable.
Of course, there's a small bonus in the R (representational) in that a load balancer can easily route the request to the right server if you have nice URLs, and GET could go to a slave while POSTs go to masters.
I think what Tom said is very accurate, however another problem with scalability is the barrier to change upon scaling. So, one of the biggest tenants of REST as it was intended is HyperMedia. Basically, the server will own the paths and pass them to the client at runtime. This allows you to change your code without breaking existing clients. However, you will find most implementations of REST to simply be RPC hiding behind the guise of REST...which is not scalable.
"Scalable" or "web scale" is one of the most abused terms when it comes to the web, the cloud and REST, and mainly used to convince management to get their support for moving their development team on board the REST train.
It is a buzzword that holds no value. If you search the web for "REST scalability" you'll find a lot of people parroting each other without any concrete evidence.
A REST service is exactly equally scalable as a service exposed over a SOAP interface. Both are just HTTP interfaces to an application service. How well this service actually scales depends entirely on how this service was actually implemented. It's possible to write a service that cannot scale as all in both REST and SOAP.
Yes, you can do things with SOAP that makes it scale worse, like rely on state and sessions. SOAP out of the box does not do this. This requires you to use a smarter load balancer, which you want anyway if you're really concerned with whatever form of scaling.
One thing that REST allows that SOAP doesn't, and that some other answers here address, is caching cacheable responses through an HTTP caching proxy or at the client side. This may make a REST service somewhat more lightly loaded than a SOAP service when a lot of operations' responses are cacheable. All this means is that fewer requests end up in your service.
The main reason behind saying a rest application is scalable is, Its built upon a HTTP protocol. Because HTTP is stateless. Stateless means it wont share anything between other request. So any request can go to any Server in a load balanced cluster. There is nothing forcing this user request go to this server. We can overcome this by using token.
Because of this statelessness,All REST application are very easy to scale. But if you want get high throughput(number of request capable in one second) in each server, then you should optimize blocking things from the application. Follow the following tips
Make each REST resource is a small entity. Don't read data from join of many tables.
Read data from near by databases
Use caches (Redis) instead of databases(You can save DISK I/O)
Always keep data sources as much as near by because these blocks will make server resources (CPU) ideal and it no other request can use that resource while it is ideal.
A reason (perhaps not the reason) is that RESTful services are sessionless. This means you can easily use a load balancer to direct requests to various web servers without having to replicate session state among all of your web servers or making sure all requests from a single session go to the same web server.
I am looking to implement a service (web/windows, .net) that maintains a list of available services and can provide an endpoint based on the nature or type of request. The requester can then pass the actual work request to the provided endpoint. The actual work requests can contain very large chunks (from 10MB up to and possibly exceeding a GB) of data.
WCF routing services sounds like a perfect fit, but turns out not to be because the it requires the actual work request to pass through it, creating a bottleneck at the routing service (the whole point is to get a system to be able to scale out). If I had smaller messages, WCF routing would be a no brainer.
Is there anything out there that fits the bill? Preferably .NET/windows based?
Do you mean because the requests block for work?
Do could use OneWay OperationContract to create async services so as to not block the request pool.
[ServiceContract]
interface IMyContract
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void DoWork()
}
Update
I think understand your question better now, you are looking to distribute load to different servers to avoid request bottle necks due to heavy traffic load (preferably distributed based on content).
I'd say that MVC Routing is indeed ideal for this. One of the features that you can leverage is the fall over functionality. You can actually define multiple backup endpoints, and in the case where one fails, it will automatically move over to the next. There's a good introduction to how this works here.
There's also a good article here that talks about load balancing with WCF using the same principles. It provides 2 solutions for a round robin filter implementation that allows you to load balance the service requests (even though at the begin he says his general answer to whether it supports load balancing is no for implementation reasons).
If you are worried about all requests routing via the one server and still becoming a bottle neck, then think of web load balancers. It's the same scenario. Sitting in the middle forwarding packets doesn't require much work, and they have no problem handling huge volumes of traffic. I don't think this is an issue IMO.
I'd like to give external access to a web application. Several applications on many clients will use this service extensively (hopefully), which will always lead to CRUD functions on a database.
Is a webservice always the first choice? Is there any rule of thumb when to choose webservices, sockets, etc?
It really depends on who your clients are, what kind of performance are you looking at, how well your clients know the technologies.
Sockets etc might give you a good performance speed but development time might increase for both, you and your clients.
SOAP web services established a standard quite some time back but now people are using REST web services more because of its simplicity and less overhead.
I am heavily impressed by the RESTful webservices offered by twilio
I am sure that Twilio is receiving hundreds of thousands of calls a day and they are performing just well.
Have a look at the following articles for more understanding about them
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-restful/
http://grails.org/doc/1.0.x/guide/13.%20Web%20Services.html
The big benefit of web services is the ease of use and the predefined interface, but they are "slower" compared to low level socket communication, because for example the XML Requests/Respnses of a SOAP-Service needs to be created/interpreded.
So I would say if you open the service to "outsider" use web services unless speed is really the biggest concern.
Also because web services are mostly accessable through port 80 you have much less problems with proxy/firewalls than with a socket on a random other port.
If you are having a high work load cahcing is also very important because it can speed up the system dramaticaly.
I would choose a web services (SOAP or REST) whenever I can. It's easier to scale a web service than a home brew socket implementation and it takes less time to build a webservice.
Sockets is usually the preferred choice if you need two-way communication (I know that WCF has callbacks).
Webservice makes it a generic way for different type of clients and applications to exchange data also it is dependent on your architecure and infrastructure.
Socket programming is bit complex and some time may create problem in data exchange. It entirely depends on your fuctionaly requirements and architecure which should you use.
if your clients will consume this data from browsers of application then webservice is better choice.
I am trying to implement web service and web client applications using Ruby on Rails 3. For that I am considering to use a SSL but I would like to know: how "heavy" is it for servers to handle a lot of HTTPS connection instead of HTTP? what is the difference of response time and the performance at all?
The cost of SSL/TLS handshake (which takes most of the overall "slowdown" SSL/TLS adds) nowadays is much less than the cost of TCP connection establishment and other actions associated with session establishment (logging, user lookup etc). And if you worry about speed and want to save any ns of time, there exist hardware SSL accelerators that you can install to your server.
It is several times slower to go with HTTPS, however, most of the time that's not what is actually going to slow your app down. Especially if you're running on Rails, your performance scaling is going to be bottlenecked elsewhere in the system. If you are doing anything that requires the passing of secrets of any kind over the wire (including a shared session cookie), SSL is the only way to go and you probably won't notice the cost. If you happen to scale up to the point where you do start to see a performance hit from encryption, there are hardware acceleration appliances out there that help tremendously. However, rails is likely to fall over long before that point.
I'm working on a real time application implemented using in a SOA-style (read loosely coupled components connected via some messaging protocol - JMS, MQ or HTTP).
The architect who designed this system opted to use JMS to connect the components. This system is real time so there no need to queue up messages should one component fail (the transaction will simply time out). Further, there is no need for guaranteed delivery or rollback.
In this instance, is there any benefit to using JMS over something like an HTTP web service (speed, resource footprint, etc)?
One thing that I'm thinking is since the JMS approach requires us to set a thread pool size (the number of components listening to a JMS topic/queue), wouldn't a HTTP service be a better fit since this additional configuration is not needed (a new thread is created for each HTTP request making the application scalable to an "unlimited" number of requests until the server runs out of resources).
Am I missing something?
I don't disagree with the points made by S.Lott at all, but here are a couple of points to consider regarding HTTP web services:
Your clients only need to know how to communicate via HTTP - a protocol well supported by just about every modern langauge in one form or another. JMS, though popular, is more specialist than HTTP, and so restricts the languages your interconnected systems can use. Perhaps not an issue for your system at the moment, but will you need to plug in other systems later that might struggle to support JMS connectivity?
Standards like WSDL and SOAP which you could levarage for your services are well supported by many langauges and there are plenty of tools around that will generate code to implement both ends of the pipeline (client and server) for you from a WSDL file, reducing the amount of dev you'll have to do. These standards also make it relatively simple to define and publish the specification of the data you'll be passing between your systems, something you'll presumably have to do by hand using a queueing technology like JMS.
On the downside, as pointed out by S.Lott, JMS gives you functionality that you throw away using the (stateless) HTTP protocol: guaranteed ordering & reliability; monitoring; scalability; etc. Are you sure you don't need these, and won't need these going forward?
Great question, btw.
I think it's really dependent on the situation. Where I work, we support Remoting, JMS, MQ, HTTP, and sFTP. We are implementing a middleware appliance that speaks Remoting, JMS, MQ, and HTTP, and a software middleware component that speaks JMS, MQ, and HTTP.
As sgreeve alluded to above, standards help us become flexible, but proprietary formats allow more functionality.
In a nutshell, I'd say use HTTP for stateless calls (which could end up meeting almost all of your needs), and whatever proprietary formats you need for stateful calls. If you work in a big enterprise, a hardware appliance is usually a great fit as middleware: Lightning fast compression, encryption, transformation, and translation, with very low total cost of ownership.
I don't know enough about your requirements, but you may be overlooking Manageability, Flexibility and Performance.
JMS allows you to monitor and manage the queue. These are features HTTP lacks, and you'd have to build rather than buy from a vendor.
Also, There are queues and topics in JMS, allowing multiple subscribers to a single publisher. Not possible in HTTP.
While you may not need those things in release 1.0, you might want them in the future.
Also, JMS may be able to use other transport mechanisms like named sockets, which reduces the overheads if there isn't all that socket negotiation going on with (almost) every request.
If you go down the HTTP route and you want to support more than one machine or some kind of reliability - you are going to need a load balancer capable of discovering the available web servers and loading requests across them - then failing over to another web server if a particular box/process dies. Clients making HTTP requests are also going to have to deal with servers failing and retrying operations in some loop.
This is one of the main features of a message queue - reliable load balancing with failover and loose coupling among the producers and consumers without them having to include retry logic - so your client or server code doesn't have to worry about this kinda thing. This is totally separate to whether or not you want message persistence or want to use ACID transactions to produce/consume messages (which can be very handy BTW).
If you focus just on the server side using Java - whether Servlets or MessageListener/MDBs they are kinda similar either way really. The difference is the load balancer.
So maybe the question should really be - is a JMS broker easier to setup & work with than setting up your DNS/NAT/IP/HTTP load balancer infrastructure?
I suppose it depends on what you mean by real-time... Neither JMS nor HTTP in my opinion support "real-time" applications well, meaning they cannot offer predictable/deterministic performance nor properly prioritize flows in the presence of contention.
Part of it is that these technologies are built on top of TCP which serializes all traffic into a single FIFO meaning that different traffic flows cannot be easily prioritized. Moreover TCP timers are not easily controlled resulting unpredictable blocking and timeouts... For this reason many streaming applications use UDP instead of TCP as an underlying protocol.
Another problem with JMS is that typical implementations use a broker that centralizes message dispatch. This is not the best architecture to get deterministic performance.
If you are looking for a middleware that can offer you the kind of reliability guarantees and publish-subscribe semantics you get with JMS, but was developed to fit the real-time application domain I recommend you take a look at the OMG Data-Distribution Service (DDS). See dds.omg.org and this article I wrote arguing why DDS is the best middleware to implement a real-time SOA. http://soa.sys-con.com/node/467488