Chapter 20. Enabling High Availability

Scalable and reliable applications require high availability to avoid any single point of failure in a distributed system. You can protect your system from single points of failure using replicated services.

A replicated service is comprised of multiple instances, or replicas, of the same service. Together these act as a single logical service. Clients invoke requests on the replicated service, and Apache CXF delivers the requests to one of the member replicas. The routing to a replica is transparent to the client.

Apache CXF supports high availability (HA) with static failover in which replica details are encoded in the service WSDL file. The WSDL file contains multiple ports, and can contain multiple hosts, for the same service. The number of replicas in the cluster remains static as long as the WSDL file remains unchanged. Changing the cluster size involves editing the WSDL file.