Best Practices for Setting Up TIBCO BusinessConnect? in the Cloud (AWS)

Table of Contents

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• Why TIBCO BusinessConnect? in the Cloud?
• Some Key Strategies

Why TIBCO BusinessConnect? in the Cloud?

Up until recently, TIBCO BusinessConnect has typically been installed and run on-premise, inside the customer?s own data center.  Due to efforts to shift hardware expenditures from fixed costs to variable expenses, many customers today want to host BusinessConnect in the cloud, and have the servers run by, e.g., Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Driven by this trend, the TIBCO BusinessConnect engineering team conducted a Proof of Concept deploying BusinessConnect on AWS successfully, using a topology shared and described here.

Some Key Strategies

See attached picture for clarity.

1. Use AWS Load Balancer for incoming messages. We use AWS Load Balancer in order to distribute the burden of requests across two or more gateway servers (labeled GS-1, GS-2).

2. Use a separate subnet for each server cluster. For example, IS-1, IS2, .. IS-n, etc. in the same firewalled subnet. IS is short for Interior Server.

3. Use RVRD between servers and subnets. Between server machines, between subnets -- and also between data centers, use the TIBCO Rendezvous Remote Daemon (RVRD) messaging system, which unlike Rendezvous Daemon (RVD) is not multicast. Update: the 7.0 version of TIBCO BusinessConnect now supports TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, which is not multi-cast. Nevertheless, this article is useful in establishing the certification of TIBCO BusinessConnect deployment in the cloud.

4. Use NAT Gateway for outgoing messages. We use the NAT Gateway for outbound documents, for extra security. This will prevent outside servers to connect to your instance, but allow your instance to initiate a handshake with other servers on the outside via the Internet.

5. For multiple data centers, install the TIBCO Administrator only in one. Some companies, for even higher availability and low-latency purposes in serving different geographies, may want to install 2 or more instances of TIBCO BusinessConnect across 2 geographically disparate data centers. It is only necessary to install one TIBCO Administrator, and have that Administrator instance connect to the other data center via RVRD (see above) to avoid multicast.

Any comment or questions? Drop us a line below in the comment section.