The document discusses physical architecture design for web applications. It describes several common architecture patterns including single server, separate database, and replicated web servers. Key considerations for architecture design are also outlined, such as performance, scalability, availability, security and constraints related to cost, complexity and standards.

1. Unit 5: Physical Architecture Design
 Introduction
 Dimensions to be considered
 Architecture Patterns:
Single server

 Separate database
 Replicated Web servers
 Separated scripting engines
 Application servers
 Web Caching
 Cloud Computing
 J2EE architectures for WebApps
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2. Physical Architecture Design: A Definition
“
 (physical) architecture design concentrates on the choice of the
hardware, network, and software components that make up the
system, to find the mix of these components that best meets the
application requirements, and at the same time respects the
”
technical and economic constraints of the project.
Ceri et al., 2003
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3. Architecture: Logical vs. Physical
3-Layered Logical Architecture 2(+)-Tiered Client/Server
Physical Architecture
......
Client WB
WB
(tier #1)
.gif
HTTP
.html
Presentation Layer
WS
WS
Business Logic Layer Server
(tier #2)
Data Mapping Layer AppServer
Scripting Eng.
WapServer
DBMS
File/Database Management System
Server HOST
...... DBMS
(tier #3)
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4. Logical-Physical Mapping: Distributed Presentation
 One fragment of the Web presentation layer is executed on the Web
browser:
Download and rendering of HTML (XML, …) documents

 Client-side scripting: JavaScript, VBScript
 Execution of embedded components: Applets, ActiveX
 The other fragment of the Web presentation layer is executed on
the server side:
 Retrieval and delivery of static documents/files
 Execution of server scripts
 Interaction with the Business Logic Layer
 The other layers are executed on the server tier(s)
 AJAX (RIA) applications may change this paradigm.
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5. Dimensions of Architecture Design
 Non-functional requirements that pursue the achievement of an
adequate level of service
 Physical, financial and organizational constraints that may affect
decision-making
 Alternative scenarios in architecture deployment
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6. Non-functional requirements that may affect Architecture Design
 Performance
 The application must sustain the expected workload defined in terms of:
 maximum number of concurrent users,
 the number of page requests served per unit of time
 the maximum time for delivering a page to the client
 Scalability
 The architecture must be easily extensible
 Availability
 Faults should not affect significantly the service delivered to users
 State maintenance
 The state of the user interaction must be preserved, even when the
application is distributed on multiple machines or failures occur
 Security:
 Data should be protected
 Users should be identified and granted access only to the data and
functions they are entitled to
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7. Constraints of Architecture Design
 Cost
 Every configuration requires a different investment, in terms of
processors, network infrastructure, interfaces, and software licenses
 The application budget may limit the choice of hardware resources and
software products
 Complexity
 Some configurations are simpler than others to set up and maintain
 The unavailability or the cost of specialized technical skills may
constrain the architecture design
 Corporate standards and infrastructures
 The WebApp may be deployed within a corporate IT infrastructure,
which may constrain the selection of hardware resources and software
products.
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8. Scenarios of Architecture Deployment
 Internal
 The application architecture is kept inside the enterprise and
maintained by the internal IT department.
 Housed
 The application architecture is maintained by the internal IT department
of the enterprise, but is physically installed at an external service
provider.
 Hosted
 The application architecture is located at the premises of an external
service provider, who also maintains it.
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9. Architecture Pattern: Single Server
Host
Web server
HTTP
HTTP
Script engine
rooter/
DBMS
firewall
Client
(browser)
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10. Single Server Pattern: Evaluation (1/2)
 Performance
 Depends on the configuration of the server: CPU speed, available
memory, disk access latency, etc.
 The DBMS is both memory and CPU-intensive
 Scalability
 Is bound by the hardware architecture of the selected server
 Availability
 Every software and hardware element is a single point of failure: if it
breaks, the entire system hangs.
 Can be improved by adding redundant hardware resources (multiple
CPUs, mirrored disks) and by installing multiple processes running
different instances of the Web server, script engine, and database …
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11. Single Server Pattern: Evaluation (2/2)
 State maintenance
 No problems with none of the three possibilities to store user data:
client, server or database
 Security:
 This the weakest aspect of is configuration: attackers breaking the
firewall and the Web server can take control of the host and gain direct
access to the database, violating data protection
 Low cost, as far as massive parallelism is not required.
 Low complexity
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12. Architecture Pattern: Separate Database
Host 2
Host 1
HTTP
HTTP
rooter/
firewall
Client firewall
DBMS
Web server + Script engine
(browser)
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
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13. Separate Database Pattern: Evaluation
 Better performance
 One extra machine
 Each tier can be tuned to the requirements of the installed software
 More scalable
 It is possible to act separately on each tier.
 Normally, the first bottleneck is in the middle tier
 Availability is not improved
 Each component is still a single point of failure
 Significantly improved security
 The inner firewall may disallow HTTP requests at all and let only
database requests pass, making it more difficult for attackers to reach
the data tier.
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14. Architecture Pattern: Replicated Web Server
WS + Script engine #1
Host 2
HTTP
HTTP
HTTP
HTTPS
rooter/ firewall/ WS + Script engine #2
firewall
Client load balancer HTTPS
DBMS
(browser)
WS + Script engine #3
(secure)
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)
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15. Replicated Web Server Pattern: Evaluation
 Improved performance and scalability:
 Load balancing
 Clustering: A cluster is a group of servers (aka nodes) that provide a
unified view of the services that they individually offer
 Improved availability:
 Fail-over: if a cluster node fails, its workload can be redistributed to the
other nodes of the same cluster
 Session state maintenance on the replicated servers
 Session affinity (aka sticky sessions): The load balancer sends all the
incoming requests pertinent to a given session to the same server.
 Session migration: Session state is shared by the servers in the cluster
 Improved data transmission security
 One of the Web servers may be configured to handle the connections
that require cryptographic protection.
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16. Architecture Pattern: Separate Script Engine
WS #1 SE #1 Host 2
HTTP
HTTP
HTTP
HTTPS
rooter/ firewall/ WS #2 SE #2
firewall
Client load balancer
DBMS
HTTPS
(browser)
WS #3 SE #3
(secure)
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17. Separate Script Engine Pattern : Evaluation
 Improved performance, scalability and availability
 Web server and the scripting engine can be replicated independently so
that the number and configuration of the hosts can be optimized: a well-
balanced configuration may require more machines for the scripting
engines than for the Web servers.
 The communication overhead introduced by the separation should be
compensated by the performance increase.
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18. Architecture Pattern: Application Server
Application
WS #1 SE #1 Server
HTTP Host 2
HTTP
HTTP
HTTPS Application
rooter/ firewall/ WS #2 SE #2 Server firewall
Client load balancer DBMS
HTTPS
(browser)
Application
WS #3 SE #3 Server
(secure)
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19. Application Server Pattern: Evaluation
 An application server is a software platform, distinct from the Web
server, dedicated to the efficient execution of business components
for supporting the construction of dynamic pages.
 Improved performance, scalability and availability:
 Transparent component distribution, replication, and load balancing:
The application server automatically manages the creation of
processes, the replication of business objects and their allocation to the
available processes, and the allotment of client requests to the increase
and decrease of the actual workload.
 Automatic failure recovery: The application server may detect
hardware, software and network failures, and avert client requests
addressed to a failed component and route them to available replicas of
the same business object.
 Resource pooling: The application server may handle pools of
expensive resources, like database connections, and share these
resource among multiple business objects in an optimized way
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20. Web Caching
 Caching consists of temporarily storing resources in a fast access
location, for later retrieval.
 Benefits:
 Reduction of the response time
 Reduction of computation effort when the resource is dynamically build
 Anything can be cached:
 Static HTML pages and multimedia files.
 Fragments of pages computed by scripting programs.
 Intermediate data consumed by the scripting programs for producing
page, e.g. XML files.
 The result of database queries or other application commands
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21. Web caching: Where to Cache (1/3)
 Browser caching:  Proxy caching:
Proxy caches store a local copy of
Every Web browser contains a cache
each resource requested by users,
of HTML pages and multimedia files
and avoid accessing the Internet for
used to speed up the rendition of
retrieving frequently asked pages
pages that contain cached objects.
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22. Web caching: Where to Cache (2/3)
 Server accelerators
A server accelerator is a “buffer” placed in front of a server cluster that

intercepts requests, caches copies of the objects produced by the
servers, and delivers them to the subsequent requests.
 Page prefetching: Based on the last request, the server accelerator
loads into cache those pages that are more probable of being
requested next.
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23. Web caching: Where to Cache (3/3)
 Content delivery networks (CDNs)
 CDNs are systems of computers networked together across the Internet
that allow content providers to outsource their caching infrastructures
 When a client requests a page to the origin server, this returns a page
with rewritten links that point to the nodes of the CDN
 The CDN serves requests selecting the optimal copy of the page by
taking into account the geographical location of the user and the real-
time traffic conditions.
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24. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically
scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a
service over the Internet. (Wikipedia)
Source: http://www.collab-ogce.org/gce08/images/7/76/LamiaYouseff.pdf
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25. Cloud Computing: Some Providers
Cloud Layer Examples of Commercial Cloud Systems
Cloud Application Google Apps and Salesforce Customer Relation
Layer Management (CRM) system
Cloud Software
Google App Engine and Salesforce Apex System
Environment
Computational Resources: Amazon's EC2.
Enomalism Elastic Cloud.
Cloud Software Storage: Amazon's S3. EMC Storage Managed
Infrastructure Service.
Communication: Microsoft Connected Service
Framework (CSF).
Grid and Cluster Computing Systems like Globus
Software Kernel
and Condor.
Firmware / IBM-Morgan Stanley's Computing Sublease, and
Hardware IBM's Kittyhawk Project.
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26. J2EE Architectures for Web Applications
 “Classic” J2EE architecture, using remote EJBs and entity beans
 Local EJB architecture, using local EJBs
 Ad hoc J2EE architecture without EJB
 Lightweight container architecture
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27. “Classic” J2EE Architecture
Web Container
J2EE
Servlets / Web Classes
Server
Business Interface
Business Delegate
RMI
J2EE
EJB Container
Server
(Same or
Session EJB
Separate
JVM
Entity EJB (optional)
DBMS Legacy System
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28. Local EJB architecture
Web Container
J2EE
Servlets / Web Classes
Server
Business Interface
Business Delegate
Local EJB Invocation
EJB Container
(Single
JVM)
Session EJB
Entity EJB (optional)
DBMS Legacy System
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29. Ad hoc J2EE Architecture without EJB
Web Container
J2EE
Servlets / Web Classes
Server
Business Interface
Implementation
DBMS
Legacy System
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30. Lightweight Container Architecture
J2EE
MVC Web Framework
Server
Web Container
Business Interface
POJO
Implementation
with declarative
services via AOP
O/R Mapping Layer
RDBMS
(Optional) Other
transactional resource
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31. J2EE Architectures: A Comparison
Architect. Simplicity Productivity Transaction Horizontal Testability
Capable Scalability
Remote Complex to Poor, Yes Inherent support Poor. It's very
EJBs implement and because of for distributing hard to test
use business complexity of objects. EJBs outside a
objects. distribution container. In-
and EJB container
programming testing is slow
model. and complex.
Local EJBs Slightly less Slightly better Yes Relies on web Poor. As for
complex to than for container to remote EJBs.
access remote EJBs. deliver clustering.
No EJB, ad Typically Productivity is No. Explicit Depends on Depends on
hoc simpler than usually better use of implementation implementation
architectures than with EJB specific APIs strategy. strategy.
using EJB. architectures. is required.
Light- Good, as High Yes, if using Relies on web Good. Easy to
weight business AOP. container to test business
container objects are deliver clustering. objects outside
POJOs. an application
server.
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32. References
 S. Ceri et al. Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications. Capítol
10. Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.
 JOHNSON, Rod and HOELLER Juergen. Expert One-on-One
J2EE Development without EJB. Willey Publishing, 2004
 Youseff, L.; Butrico, M.; Da Silva, D. Toward a Unified Ontology of
Cloud Computing. Grid Computing Environments Workshop, 2008.
GCE '08, pages 1-10.
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~lyouseff/CCOntology/CloudOntology.pdf
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