Daniel PersonThe Challenge
At xByte Cloud, we work with large ecommerce customers who have millions of shoppers visiting their storefront each month. A performant solution like Load-Balancing is often deployed to help accommodate their growing customer base. But it’s important not to sacrifice user experience for additional performance, and that is one challenge most engineers face. Relying on built-in ColdFusion session management in a load balanced environment can lead to session loss, especially during reboots, server failures, or load balancing transitions. That’s why xByte Cloud recommends deploying a load balanced solution using Redis, a centralized session management system that maintains user sessions separate from any backend server failure.
Pro Tip: Contact xByte Cloud to help configure your optimized cloud environment
The Load Balance Solution
Load balancing acts as a backbone for high-performing web applications as it distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck. A Cloud Load-Balancer not only improves response times, but it also ensures fault tolerance by eliminating single points of failures (including itself). This solution also places a barrier between attackers and your application servers, by eliminating direct access to other ports.
All of this is possible because we chose to partner with Cloudflare. Cloudflare boasts a growing number of revolutionary edge services, but the most notable are LB, CDN, DNS, WAF, API, analytics, and a number of security prevention addons (anti DDOS, bots, GEO-Filtering). But the biggest reason we use CloudFlare as our Load-Balancing provider is because of their global “Anycast” network. Which means that any Load-Balancer instance is actually several instances all over the world using the same IP address. Anyone that connects to your Load Balancer is connecting to an instance in their region. If that node goes down, users in that area will connect to the next closest node, using the same IP address. This process is essential in avoiding single points of failures efficiently.
Enhanced Performance with Redis Session Storage
Redis, a powerful in-memory data structure store, excels in session management due to its lightning-fast read and write speeds. By storing session data in Redis, your ColdFusion applications gain the ability to store and share session state without the overhead of maintaining it. In the event of a web server failure, Redis ensures that session data remains intact, allowing users to continue their interactions without disruption, regardless of which backend server they’re utilizing.
We encourage you to check out Charlie Arehart’s site for a performance issue workaround and notes from his Redis session. There are also blogs from Chris Svajlenka and Ben Nadel that cover some of their experiences and some development challenges they faced.
Deployment Strategies
For a typical Redis solution, we deploy a single Linux VM running Redis, within the same LAN segment as your web servers. Your web application is then configured to utilize the Redis instance so that session data may be served as needed.
But we can also accommodate custom deployments, like GEO-Failover, which requires separate web and database servers in clusters that span racks, cities, or regions. Within each location you would have web, database and Redis servers, much like a single deployment, but with a mirrored setup in the opposing location. This requires services to be clustered and synchronized with the opposing location so that data integrity is reliable and up to date. The Geo-Failover solution does incur some latency when each new user visits the site, as new writes must be confirmed from the furthest node before writes are counted as complete. Typically, only one location would ever be live at one time, but there are exceptions. We can discuss the options and techniques for reducing latency in more detail if you reach out to our geo-failover team.
Reliability in the Cloud
Cloudflare load balancing, coupled with Redis Session storage, offers a highly reliable solution for ColdFusion applications. ColdFusion applications can scale horizontally without worrying about session management overhead, allowing businesses to expand their digital footprint with confidence. With Cloudflare’s global network of data centers, traffic can be intelligently routed to the nearest Cloud node, minimizing latency, and maximizing uptime. In the event of server failures, Cloudflare’s automatic failover mechanisms ensure uninterrupted service delivery, providing peace of mind to both developers and end-users.
Conclusion
Our ecommerce customers rely on performant and reliable session-based experiences. Their sales can continue to grow without them having to worry about Cloud technology, and we make sure their solution can handle increased customer volumes for the foreseeable future.
In the competitive landscape of Cloud computing, web performance, reliability, and scalability are non-negotiable. By leveraging xByte Cloud, Cloudflare, and Redis, your applications can achieve new heights of efficiency and resilience. These services together will add an extra layer of reliability to the equation, ensuring end users receive optimal experiences regardless of external factors.
Let us help you embrace these technologies and watch as your ColdFusion applications thrive through the next digital age.
