How to make my Java application scalable and fault tolerant?

Question

In a simplified manner my Java application can be described as follows:

It is a web application running on a Tomcat server with a SOAP interface. The application uses JPA/Hibernate to store data in a MySQL database. The data stored consists of list of users, a list of hosts, and a list of URIs pointing to huge files (10GB) in the filesystem. The whole system consists of a central server, where my application is running on, and a bunch of worker hosts. A user can connect to the SOAP interface and ask the system to copy the files that belong to him to a specific worker host, where he then can analyze the data in some way (We cannot use NFS, we need to copy the data to the local disc storage of a worker host). The database then stores for each user on which worker host his files are stored.

At the moment the system is running with one central server with the Tomcat application and the MySQL database and 10 worker hosts and about 30 users which have 100 files (on average 10GB) size stored distributed over the worker hosts.

But in the future I have to scale the system by a factor of 100-1000. So I might have to deal with 10000 users, 100000 files and 10000 hosts. And the system should also become fault tolerant, so that I have don't have a single central server (which is the single point of failure in the system now), but maybe several ones. Also, if one of the worker hosts fails the system should be notified, so it doesn't try to copy files on that server.

My question is now: Which Java technologies could I use to make my application scalable and fault tolerant? What kind of architecture would you recommend? Should I still have a huge database storing all the information about all files, hosts and users in the system in one place, or should I better distribute my database on several hosts and synchronize them somehow?

Answer 1

The technology you need is called Architecture.

No matter which technology you use, you need to have a well-architected system for scalability and redundancy. Make a diagram of the entire architecture of the system as it currently works. Mark each component with its limitations for users, jobs, bandwidth, hard drive space, memory, or whatever parts are limiting for your application. This will give you the baseline design.

Now draw that same diagram as it would need to be to meet your scalability and redundancy requirements. You might have to break apart pieces to make it work, or develop entirely new pieces. This diagram will make it very clear what you need.

One specific thing I want to address is the database. If you can split the database across logistic lines so that you do not join any queries from one to another, then you should have separate databases. Beyond that, the best configuration for a database is to have each database on one fast machine with lots of storage and very fast access times. If you do this, the only thing that will slow down your database are bad queries or poorly-indexed tables. In my experience, synchronizing databases is to be avoided unless you have one master database that has write access and it replicates to other databases which are read-only. Regardless, this can be a last step after you've profiled all of your queries and you literally need additional hardware.