Routing introduction
Spotfire provides routing capabilities within the environment.
A cluster of Spotfire Servers in an environment can be fronted by a load balancer to distribute the traffic to the servers. No load balancer is required between Spotfire Server and the nodes because the routing capability of Spotfire Server features built-in load balancing, enabling non-opened analyses to be loaded by the least utilized Web Player service instance.
By default, any Spotfire Server in a cluster can send requests from clients to any Spotfire Web Player service instance. Likewise, any Spotfire Web Player service instance can access any Spotfire Server for library data or to execute information links.
After an analysis has been opened in a client, all subsequent requests for the session are forwarded to the instance that was used for the initialization; thus Spotfire Server routing maintains analysis session affinity.
Default routing improves capacity utilization by forwarding requests for a specific analysis file to the instance or instances of the Spotfire Web Player where it is already opened, thereby serving multiple users with the same service instance. Analysis data is also shared between users, so additional users accessing the analysis file will have a low impact on performance.
In addition to the default routing, administrators can create resource pools and assign any Spotfire Web Player instances to them. The resource pools abstraction enables default routing to be altered by specific routing rules. Rules can be specified for users, groups, or specific analysis files, and are defined and applied in priority order, similar to mail sorting rules. Rules can be sorted, enabled, disabled, and re-mapped to a different resource pool.
Also, administrators can attach schedules to routing rules that apply to analysis files, effectively turning a routing rule into a scheduled update. Thereby, the administrator can have the analysis pre-loaded on selected instances in a resource pool, and have the analysis refreshed at specified intervals.