Deploying a web app to multiple VM instances

Question

Is there a way to deploy a web app on one VM instance, and use some other instances to share the workload of the deployment server VM instance?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Your question is two fold so here is what you can do:

• You can use load balancer /web proxies to provide a single URL which will redirect the request to actual workers in background (As mentioned in comment). For example Apache Web Server can act as load balancer for applications deployed in Apache Tomcat containers.

• To deploy same application to multiple VMs - you can use orchestration tools (Chef/Puppet) or you can use plugins/utilities specially built for that purpose i.e. deploy a single application to 24 tomcats on 24 different machines and likes. Some such utilities I know of are LiveRebel, DeployIT by xebialabs and so on!