The goal is to have frontends communicate directly with backends by using IP addresses instead of DNS in cloud environments. This will remove the unnecessary components in-between the two and associated overhead.
- AWS is very dynamic in nature. A lot of their services start with ‘E’ for elastic.
- IP addresses change all the time, allowing more flexibility.
- The number of server performing a task may increase or decrease at any time.
- So far, standard industry technologies don’t operate optimally in this dynamic environment.
- Many cache DNS lookups for performance. This is great in a static environment but a burden in AWS.
- A few technologies used at FINRA required significant additional effort and workarounds included:
- Varnish
- Apache
- Nginx (special configuration required)
- It was difficult to automatically configure frontends and know about the backends without using DNS.
- This required additional components between the front ends and back ends.
- More components meant more overhead in maintenance, testing, and development.
- More components meant more failure points.
Create a light weight application that informs the frontends of the backends, allowing them to communicate directly with IP addresses.
- Pluggable
- It's able to extend components to suit your needs.
- Frontend agnostic
- Additional implementations are available for different frontend technologies (Varnish, Nginx, etc).
- Backend agnostic
- ElasticD only needs a way to find the backend's IP address.
- Cloud agnostic
- At FINRA, we use AWS but the resource locator can be extended for other cloud offerings.
