Sticky Sessions with Manager Nodes

When a single WSO2 product is interacting with a web application, a session object is created and remains in the memory of the WSO2 product. However, in a clustered environment, where you could have multiple WSO2 product servers fronted by a load balancer to balance the load among these products, the situation is a little different.

If the backend application is state-full, it may use sessions. Sessions can be managed in two different ways.

• Using sticky sessions: In this approach, once a session is created by the backend server, a session ID will be sent back to the client in the response message. This session ID will be tracked by the intermediate load balancers. If the user/client sent another request with the same session ID, that request will be sent to the same backend server.
•  Session replication: In this approach, backend servers will replicate the sessions among all the nodes in the cluster, and the load balancers will be able to send any request to any node.

This session can be implemented at the HTTP level or at the SOAP level. One downside of this approach is if a node has failed, the sessions associated with that node are lost and need to be restarted. It is common to couple this solution with a shared database solution. With sticky sessions enabled, the session data is kept in memory, but persistent data is saved into a database.

If cluster nodes share state, and they are not stored in same shared persistent media like a database, all changes done at each node have to be disseminated to all other nodes in the cluster. Often, this is implemented using a group communication method. Group communication keeps track of the members of groups of nodes defined by users and updates the group membership when nodes have joined or if they leave. When a message is sent using group communication, it guarantees that all nodes in the current group will receive the message. For WSO2 products, the clustering implementation uses Hazelcast as the form of group communication to disseminate all the changes to all other nodes in the cluster.