Using HTTP Server - Part 1: Introduction

During the development of our SaaS infrastructure, we have found very useful the usage of IBM HTTP Server in front of our WAS servers. Not only for load balancing on TDWC cluster, but also for security, performances and to modify some behaviors.

Setting up IBM HTTP Server is pretty simple and includes the following phases.

• Define architecture and SSL certificates
• Configure TDWC in cluster
• Install both IBM HTTP Server and Web Server Plugin
• Configure HTTP server
• Configure web server plugin

I'll dedicate a specific article to each of the above phases.

On our SaaS, in addition to TDWC access, we use the HTTP server also for connections from dynamic agents and to handle few redirects:

- to display a disclaimer at the beginning of each session

- to replace the logout page with a custom one.

HTTP server can also be used to set browser caching and reduce the network traffic and TDWC server load.

The presence of HTTP server improves TDWC scalability also because reduce the impact of network latency on the server. In this configuration TDWC can return the result back to TDWC very quickly, with HTTP server that will keep a thread active to return the data back to browser. This reduces the number of active threads in TDWC server.

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