Scaling up

While small and straightforward applications can be configured within a single app or site, there will be many cases where you need to split the functionality over multiple apps.

Scalability

The most obvious scenario is where you have more workload than will comfortably fit on a single server. A good example is where there are a lot of time-consuming background tasks – calculations or preparation of PDFs, sending of bulk email etc. In these cases you may wish to have a single front-end server, and a set of back-end servers that act to support this.

Modular functionality

Where you have some sophisticated functionality configured, you can encapsulate this in an app and then make use of it from other front-end apps by passing the information between them. This principle of application reuse leads to more consistent systems and reduces the opportunity for error.

Intersite Communication

Key to implementing any scalable solution is a flexible method of allowing the individual apps, which may be located on the same or different servers, to communicate securely between themselves.

The Intersite Communication documentation details the components and configuration provided to do this.