Amazon Makes the Cloud Sticky

Stateless applications may be the long term answer to scalability of applications in the cloud, but until then, we need a solution like sticky sessions (persistence). Amazon recently introduced “stickiness” to its ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) offering. I’ve written a bit about “stickiness” before so I won’t reiterate again but to say, “it’s about time.” Remember that most web applications today rely upon state (session) to store quite a bit of application and user specific data that’s necessary for the application to behave properly. When a load balancer distributes requests across instances without consideration for where that state (session) is stored, the application behavior can become erratic and unpredictable. Hence the need for “stickiness”.

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