Axis2 Clustering Support

Axis2 1.3 release has experimental clustering support enabling you to deploy your services in a cluster for Scalability, Failover support and HA. In simple terms, we provide replication for Service Context, Service Group Context and ConfigurationContext. This enables you to deploy your services in a cluster and share state. Please give it a spin and provide feedback via the mailing lists.
Please check the Axis2 Clustering Guide for a good introduction.



In Summary, here are a few points worth remembering

• For Stateful Web Services it is recommended to deploy in pairs using the primary/secondary model. i.e Each Node will replicate to one or more backups (secondary nodes) for failover.
  
• There will be only one active node at any given time. This is to avoid conflicts as we don't have a distributed locking mechanism.
  
• To achieve Scalability, you need to deploy several of these pairs. In other words your cluster will consist of multiple pairs with one active node in each - and your pairs are isolated sub groups with no replication between them.
  
• If your cluster consists of more than one pair, you need to use some sort of partitioning to avoid a user being serviced by more than one pair within a given session in order to avoid potential conflicts. You could use session affinity to achieve this.
  
• There is no such restriction for Stateless Web Services.
  
• If your Services read shared state more frequently and update very rarely, you could experiment with more than one active node. However conflicts are still possible.
  

Sanjiva asked me to help over a year ago and it got postponed month after month due to other commitments until I was finally able to produce a prototype. Many thanks to Afkam Azeez, Chamikara, Snajay and Sanjiva for the support they provided. Azeez and Chamikara was primarily responsible for bringing the clustering support to it's current state after I contributed an initial implementation. If not for those two it would have been next to impossible to get it included in the release. Special thanks to Philip Hanik for answering questions on Apache Tribes even while on vacation.