There are very good reasons: 1. Security - splitting server roles onto different physical or virtual machines simplifies the task of locking down unnecessary services on each. It also adds a layer of defense in depth: a web server exploit only exposes the web server machine, and your application server is still safe. Intrusion detection is important here, if a machine is compromised you need to know about it. You can also add all kinds of inter-machine firewalls and monitoring here. 2. Management - patching, updating, backups are simplified as each machine is performing an isolated task. 3. Scalability - a load balancer can be slipped in between each infrastructural tier. Provided you construct your apps with a stateless architecture, scaling up is a relatively straightforward task of adding more role-specific machines to the tier in question.
By the way none of this advice is ColdFusion or BlueDragon specific. Hope that helps, Eric Sent from my mobile device On Jun 13, 2011, at 5:05 PM, Matthew Woodward <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 8:51 AM, JEAguilar <[email protected]> wrote: > But, if I'm planning on scaling with > OpenBD (and Google App Engine is not an option), is it a best practice > with OpenBD to segregate the functions onto different machines? > > The number of tiers in the architecture doesn't necessarily mean different > machines. > > Honestly the only answer is "it depends on your situation." For the vast > majority of things I do Apache and Tomcat are on the same box and it works > quite well. As with most things you'd have to ask yourself what you're > gaining by putting the web server on a separate box vs. the cost of having > that sort of setup (cost in terms of both money and time to maintain), and > depending on your situation you may land on one side or another. > > And of course if you don't need Apache at all, your servlet container may be > acting as your web server. There's nothing wrong with that setup either. > > Even if you do have Apache and Tomcat running on the same box they're already > separated to the point where if you needed to (for some reason) run Apache on > another box, it's easy enough to split that out later. > > So I guess if I had to actually answer your question ;-), I'd personally say > don't worry about having Apache and Tomcat on separate boxes unless you have > a specific reason to need to do that. That sort of configuration change > really isn't difficult to make later if you find you need to do so. > > -- > Matthew Woodward > [email protected] > http://blog.mattwoodward.com > identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward > > Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. > as attachments. > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html > -- > official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ > mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en -- official tag/function reference: http://openbd.org/manual/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
