This is about issue https://issues.jboss.org/browse/UNDERTOW-626, the background, possible solutions and workarounds. But first I’d like to thank Steward for his quick response to the issue and also to my problem with HotSpot 1.8.0_71. Build problem solved!

I live in a country that has 9 states. In the area I work, they share a datacenter. Some applications are organised centrally (one database for all states), some are organised locally (each state has its own database and its own application server). We have a rather big application that is organised locally. Since there are quite a few users and we want to have good availability, each state has at least two JBoss servers (EAP6.4 right now). So we have about 20 servers in production. The problem now is, that they don’t live an isolated life, but sometimes they have to talk to each other. And not only with each other but also with a few other applications, some of them organised locally, some centrally. Usually they communicate synchronously with web services. Usually web services are configured point-to-point. This creates quite some configuration challenge. And I’m not talking about micro services here.

To ease the problem, a kind of hub and spoke architecture was introduced. Apache httpd with mod_jk is put in front of some applications. This eases configuration to some degree. But it has its downsides. When you kill the hub, all lights go out. Been there, done that, not fun! Also when you add some servers or applications, you have to configure the central mod_jk. The later problem can be solved with mod_cluster. I love mod_cluster! You don’t have to configure it. Just add servers, deploy or undeploy applications on JBoss, no configuration on the central hub necessary.

Architects recommend a bus-architecture to overcome the downsides of a central hub. A service bus should have a decentral organisation similar to a hardware bus. Applications connect to the bus and should be able to exchange messages without further configuration. However, when I looked at products called “Enterprise Service Bus”, I had difficulties to see the bus, most look like hub and spoke architectures.

But then the Undertow team announced the support for mod_cluster in Undertow, which got me really excited. Now it could be possible to create a service bus to connect WildFly servers. You just configure mod_cluster within WildFly and you send web service requests to your own server (localhost) instead of the real destination (https://developer.jboss.org/thread/249311). Because mod_cluster knows about the location of all other servers with the same multicast-address (the bus-adress), it sends the request to the final destination. A real service bus, almost configuration free and comes out of the box with WildFly. Is it only me or do others think as well that this could be a real burner?

The problem is described in https://issues.jboss.org/browse/UNDERTOW-626. When you have local context and modcluster filter, modcluster sends requests first to other servers and creates a loop.

Unfortunately i couldn’t test it until now, but I will soon. It could work for our special case, since we have only one application on one server and only a few contexts. Something like that would have to work:

The solution will be problematic, if you e.g. undeploy one out of several applications on WildFly. Then you would have to reconfigure the predicate and remove some parts of the "and not path-prefix(/…)” This makes it rather difficult.

In https://github.com/undertow-io/undertow/pull/356/files we tried to change the mod cluster filter such that it doesn’t forward a request if it the context exists on the local server.

The problem is, that is uses conventions from WildFly to answer the question “What is my local jvmroute”. The system-property “jboss.node.name” is the default in WildFly, but thats not necessarily true otherwise. But we couldn’t find how to access the configuration property instance-id within undertow.

In https://github.com/undertow-io/undertow/pull/356 Steward pointed out that the problem should be solved in WildFly. Could you point us in a direction where we could go? We are willing to invest some time into this issue, but we don’t have enough inside knowledge from Undertow or WildFly jet.

Right now modcluster is invoked before the deployed applications are invoked. Maybe one could do it the other way round and invoke modcluster only if the deployed applications return “not found”? I just don’t know enough about Undertow to decide whether this is feasible or just a stupid idea.