Introduction

Deploying applications to the cloud, requires a critical re-think of how applications should be architected and designed to take advantage of the bounty that the cloud has to offer. In many cases, this requires a paradigm shift in how we design the components of our applications to interact with each other. In this post, we shall explore how web applications typically manage session state and how cloud services can be leveraged to provide greater scalability.

Web Application Tiers

It is a common practice to design and deploy Scalable Web Applications in a 3-tiered configuration, namely as follows:

1. Web Tier: This tier consists of anywhere from a single to a large number of identically configured web servers that are primarily responsible for authenticating and managing requests from users as well as coordinating requests to subsequent tiers in the web architecture. Cloud-enabled Web Servers commonly utilize the HTTP protocol and the SOAP or REST styles to facilitate communication with the Service Tier.

2. Service Tier: This tier is responsible for managing business logic and business processing. The Service Tier comprises of a number of identical stateless nodes that host services that are responsible for performing a specific set of routines or processes.

3. Data Tier: The data tier hosts business data across a number of structured or unstructured formats and most cloud providers commonly host a variety of storage formats, including Relational Databases, NoSQL and simple File Storage, commonly known as BLOBS (Binary Large OBjects).

4. Load Balancing (Optional): An optional tier of load balancers can be deployed on the perimeter of the  Web Services tier to load balance requests from users and distribute load among servers in the Web Tier.

Managing Session State

Any web application that serves users in a unique way needs an efficient and secure method of keeping track of each user’s requests during active session.  For example, an e-commerce shopping site that provides each user with a unique shopping cart needs to be able to track the individual items in each user’s shopping cart for the duration of their active web session. More importantly, the web application that serves the user needs to be designed to be resilient to failures and potential loss of session data. In a Web Services architecture, there are a number of methods which can be employed to manage the session state of a user. We shall explore the most common methods below:

  • Web Tier Stateful (Sticky) Sessions: A web application can be designed such that the active Web Server node that a user get’s redirected to stores the session information locally and all future requests from the user are served by that node. This means that the Server Node becomes stateful in nature. Several disadvantages of this design are that the node serving the user becomes a single point of failure and also that any new nodes added to the collection of Web Servers can only share the load of subsequently established sessions since existing sessions continue to be maintained on existing nodes, thus severely limiting the scalability of this design and its ability to evenly distribute load
  • Web Tier Stateless Session Management: This design solves several limitations stated in the previous design by storing user session state externally, that can be referenced by any of the connected Web Server nodes. An efficient way to store small amounts of session data can be via a small cookie that stores a Session ID for the individual user. This Session ID can serve as a pointer for any inbound request between the user and the Web Application. Cloud Service Providers offer various types of storage to host Session State data, including NoSQL, Persistent Cloud Storage and Distributed Web Cache storage. For example, a web-tier request would be written to use AJAX to call REST services that would in turn pull JSON data relating to an individual user’s session state.
  • Service Tier Stateless Session Management: In most web architectures, the Service Tier is designed to be insulated from user requests. Instead, the Web Tier acts as a proxy or intermediary, allowing the Service Tier to be designed to be run in a trusted environment. Services running in this tier do not require state information and are completely stateless. Due to this statelessness, the service tier enjoys the benefits of the loose coupling of services, which allows individual services to be written in different forms of code such as Java, Python, C#, F# or Node.js based on the proficiency of the development teams and are still able to communicate with each other.

Summary

Stateless Session Management allows us to build scalable compute nodes within a Web Application Architecture that are easy to deploy and manage, and reduce single points of failure and take advantage of scalability and resiliency offered by Cloud Services providers to host session state data.