New solutions for exposing clustered applications deployed in the cloud

Abstract

Hosting applications in the cloud has become very popular. In this context, automatic application scaling, health checking and bootstrapping required services has never been easier. However, there are some types of services that require direct communication between a server and a client, bypassing the cloud. Popular examples include data grids (distributed caching solutions) and gaming servers. Most of these services use custom network protocols based on TCP or UDP transport, along with client-side load balancing, for optimizing network traffic. Unfortunately, most cloud vendors use HTTP-based reverse proxies and are unable to route custom protocols effectively. The major contribution of this paper is a proposed method for using a single load balancer per application instance (replica) to solve the problem of effective communication between a clustered application deployed within the cloud, and a client hosted in the outside world.