Tomcat Clustering in Microsoft Azure

Question

Is there any chance to cluster Tomcat in Microsoft Azure? I know that it is possible to run Tomcat with the use of Tomcat Solution Accelerator. Since the normal Tomcat clustering is based on multicasts, it can not be used in Microsoft Azure.

Is there another option?

Thanks in advance for reading and answering my question. Every comment/idea is highly appreciated

Answer 1

One option would be to use memcached-session-manager: http://code.google.com/p/memcached-session-manager/

It's a tomcat session manager that additionally stores sessions in memcached for session failover (or in a memcached compatible key-value store), while still keeping them in (and reading them from) local memory for optimal performance. I created this project as for one of our clients we needed a reliable, high performance and scalable session failover solution without any licensing restrictions / commercial interests (even tomcats own session replication has scalability restrictions, also mentioned in their documentation). memcached-session-manager was built with sticky sessions in mind, right now I'm adding support for non-sticky sessions if this is relevant to you. The communication with memcached is tcp, no multicast support needed.

Another product you might want to have a look at are terracotta web sessions ( http://www.terracotta.org/web-sessions/), but I cannot tell you much about it as I haven't run it in production by myself. Not sure about the transport layer, but it shouldn't be using multicast either.