8.2. The Challenge

The development environment that Altura initially used to build and syndicate its customized online shopping malls proved difficult to scale when traffic to the sites suddenly began to increase. They also found flaws in the original development environment that caused unexpected crashes—yet a lack of sophisticated management and monitoring tools in that environment often left Altura IT personnel unaware that a server application had crashed.

Altura officials explored their options and finally concluded that there was no practical way to fix the problems their original environment presented. They could overcome the traffic management and server performance problems only by deploying a large number of servers to accommodate the increasing volume of traffic. However, managing a large number of servers without a centralized monitoring console created other problems, which Altura could only solve by writing its own specialized monitoring application and management tools. To get through the holiday shopping season of 1999, Altura did, in fact, run its site in this manner—with home-grown software monitoring more than 120 Web servers, each supporting no more than 15 to 20 users at a time.

However, even as they committed to getting through the shopping season by this route, Altura officials acknowledged this was a short-term solution and that the only viable long-term solution was to rearchitect their site. Without knowing exactly what shape that solution would take, they knew what it should include: a scalable, highly available, standards-based application-server architecture that would be Java language–based, J2EE specification compliant, and hardware agnostic.