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Distributed Deployment Architecture

Application deployment on multiple servers.

Vaadin applications can be deployed on multi-host distributed architectures, such as container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or virtual and physical machine clusters. The same Vaadin application can be installed on multiple servers with a load balancer that distributes the user requests to different machines depending on the load. This architecture meets the requirements for scalability and high availability but introduces extra complexity to the deployment processes.

Scalability

Scalability refers to the ability of the application to handle a huge workload and expand in response to increased traffic. Vertical scalability means adding more resources to the system to meet increasing demand, whereas horizontal scalability means adding more machines to host different instances of the same application.

Vertical scalability has the advantages of lower cost and simpler maintenance over horizontal scalability. However, the disadvantages are that it is:

  • susceptible to downtime, for example, during upgrades

  • introducing a single point of failure

  • limited by the physical upgrade limitations of a single machine.

Compared to vertical scalability, horizontal scalability has the advantages of:

  • highly reduced or even avoided downtime periods

  • increased resilience

  • increased fault tolerance

  • increased performance by delegating the traffic to multiple machines.

The disadvantages are the complex maintenance and operation and the increased cost of adding new servers.

Vaadin applications do not require any specific actions for vertical scaling. In contrast, horizontal scaling requires configuring sticky sessions in the load balancer due to the stateful nature of Vaadin UIs.

Sticky sessions are a load balancer feature that ensures all requests from a user (session) are sent to the same server in a cluster. This means that sessions don’t need to be replicated between servers, therefore reducing the complexity of the server cluster.

However, sticky sessions are not enough when scaling down an application. If the machine serving the application requests goes out of service during a user session, the session must be available on the other servers to allow the user to continue their work without disruption. Session replication is a required feature to achieve non-disruptive downscaling.

High Availability

High availability is the ability of a system to ensure high performance without interruption during a set time. When a server stops working, it is transparently replaced by a different machine so that the user can continue their work without disruption.

Session replication is required for Vaadin applications to achieve high availability since the session data must be distributed between multiple servers.

Even if session replication is a requirement for high availability, the recommendation is to keep using sticky sessions for as long as a specific server is available. This is recommended due to the effort required to make the Vaadin application state stored in the HTTP session fully serializable and distributable to different servers on the network. Further effort is required if the application is not designed from the beginning to be deployed in a distributed system.

Session Replication

Implementing effective session replication for Vaadin applications can be a challenge:

  • All the Java components used in the UI must implement the java.io.Serializable interface.

  • Class members must be serializable as well or defined as transient fields.

  • The application must be able to hook into the deserialization process to initialize transient field values. For example, transient fields referencing singleton services injected by a Dependency Inject framework must be initialized upon deserialization with the managed instances.

  • The session needs to be serialized and stored in a distributed persistence storage on every request.

  • When the user requests are forwarded to a different server, the data must be loaded, deserialized, and used to populate the new session.

Generic session replication solutions cannot be used with a Vaadin application because serialization must take care of the Vaadin session locking that prevents concurrent modification of the user interface.

For more information on session replication, read the Session Replication in the World of Vaadin blog post.

For applications that require session replication, Vaadin provides a solution with the Kubernetes Kit: The Kit handles session serialization and deserialization as well as persistence using distributed storage. It also provides a tool to help detect and fix serialization issues during development.

The Session Replication in Vaadin: What’s new? blog post provides a brief introduction to the Kubernetes Kit features.

For more information on making a Vaadin application serializable, consult the Kubernetes Kit serialization tips and issues.

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