Taking our introductory series onwards, this blog will look at how you set up a simple Payara Server cluster on Windows using the native remote control protocol, DCOM. We will set up two instances on Windows 10, controlled by a third Domain Administration Server (DAS) instance on Windows 7 via DCOM, and cluster them together using Hazelcast. Finally, we will deploy our trusty clusterjsp application to demonstrate how the data is being shared across our instances.

Both Payara Server and Payara Micro can cluster together and share data using Hazelcast. Out-of-the-box, there is no configuration needed, since Hazelcast uses multicast to discover and join other cluster members. However, when running in cloud environments like AWS, for example, there are a lot of things which can stop discovery being quite so straightforward. The key thing is that Multicast is not available, meaning another discovery strategy is needed; the most common generic alternative is to use TCP, but this assumes that you know at least the intended subnet that your cluster members will be in ahead of time.

Further developing our introductory blog series, this post will look at how you can dynamically scale your cluster, and how Payara Server handles failover between cluster members.

Failover is the ability to continue to provide access to your website or application in the event of a server failing. It is an important part of high availability hosting, which aims to minimise downtime across your server infrastructure.

In order to make a cluster of servers appear as one server, you need to introduce a load balancer. A load balancer will accept a request, and redirect it to one of the members of the cluster depending on a given configuration. A web server such as NGINX or Apache can act as this load balancer as well as a reverse proxy, which allows the web server to load balance requests across the cluster, act as a termination point for SSL connections to reduce strain on the cluster, as well as cache server content for quicker access. In this blog, we will set up NGINX as a reverse proxy and secure it using SSL.

This quick vlog shows off a few of the recent features and changes we added to Payara Micro in the 171 release. In it, we’ll cover sending asadmin commands to Micro instances from the DAS, how config changes in a pre-existing Payara Micro domain now get packaged up when creating an Uber JAR, as well as a couple of quality of life changes we’ve added.

Continuing our introductory blog series, this blog will demonstrate how to set up a simple Hazelcast cluster of two instances.

In contrast to a development environment, where a single server is enough to act as a "proof of concept", in production it is usually necessary to look at reliably hosting your application across multiple redundant hosts to guarantee a reliable service and allow for future scaling. With Payara Server, it is possible to easily create and add instances to clusters using Hazelcast, making configuration of a distributed application a breeze.

Continuando con nuestra serie de introducción, este blog va a demostrar como configurar un cluster sencillo de dos instancias mediante Hazelcast.

In case you missed the news earlier this week - we are pleased to announce a new release of Payara Micro and Payara MicroProfile 171 to start the new year with a bang! With this new release, we have implemented substantial changes that are meant to improve the stability and usability of both 'regular' and MicroProfile version of Payara Micro. As is usual with our releases, keep special attention to our blog in the following weeks to read detailed articles on these changes and features to take full advantage of them!

For Payara support customers, LTS - Long Term Support - has been introduced for both Payara Micro and Payara MicroProfile so you can expect a full year of patch releases which only include fixes - great news for users who value stability over new features (find out more about the support services here)! 

All new changes and features introduced in this release are also included in Payara MicroProfile unless explicitly stated.

Kick-starting yet another year, we are pleased to announce our largest release yet - Payara Server 4.1.1.171. Building on a year's worth of updates and improvements, in this release, you can find 18 brand new features and over 60 new fixes and enhancements for Payara Server & Payara Micro! Given the size of the additions, look out for detailed blogs in the near future. For now, check out below for a summary of the changes in 171 release, and have a look at the full release notes.

In our continuing series on alternatives for commercial Oracle GlassFish features , in this article we are looking at Hazelcast - a replacement for Oracle's Coherence ActiveCache.