Techniques for changing your topology

This section provides techniques for changing your topologies.

As discussed in the Planning your URIs topic, each application has it's own public URI root, which is the basis for artifact URIs and links.

The best way to move applications to other hosts is to do so in a way that preserves the public URI root. You can do this by changing the DNS entry for the host name from the URL, to resolve to a new physical address. The install topology examples topic shows several possible deployment topologies. Some of these examples show all of the applications installed to a single application server, such as the Example topology: Standard departmental.

There may be instances where you start with such a topology, but then later want to change it. For example, as your needs change and your project grows, you may decide later that you need to distribute the applications on separate hosts, to handle higher loads and provide greater throughput (as illustrated in Example topology: Distributed enterprise).

There are two techniques you can use to change from an all in one server topology to a distributed topology, without modifying the public URI root. One technique is to use a reverse proxy, and another is to use virtual host names.