Tomcat cluster in Microsoft Azure

Question

Is it likely to group Tomcat in Microsoft Azure? I know that you can start Tomcat using Tomcat Solution Accelerator. Because regular Tomcat clustering is based on multicasting, it cannot be used in Microsoft Azure.

Is there any other option?

Thanks in advance for reading and answering my question. Each comment / idea is much appreciated.

Answer 1

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

This is the tomcat session manager, which additionally stores sessions in memcached to switch the session (or in the memcached-compatible key value store) while saving them (and reading them) from local memory for optimal performance. I created this project because for one of our clients we needed a reliable, high-performance and scalable solution for a fail-safe session without any licensing / commercial interests restrictions (even Tomcats own quotes have scalability restrictions also mentioned in their documentation). memcached-session-manager was created with sticky sessions in mind, now I am adding support for non-sticky sessions, if this applies to you. Communication with memcached is tcp, multicast support is not required.

Another product you might want to see is terracotta web sessions ( http://www.terracotta.org/web-sessions/ ), but I can’t tell you about it since I didn’t launch it myself . Not sure about the transport layer, but it should not use multicast.