1.2 Features of Oracle Traffic Director

Oracle Traffic Director provides the following features:

• Advanced methods for load distribution

  You can configure Oracle Traffic Director to distribute client requests to servers in the back end by using one of the following methods:

  • Round robin

  • Least connection count

  • Least response time

  • Weighted round robin

  • Weighted least connection count

• Flexible routing and load control on back-end servers

  • Request-based routing

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to route HTTP/S requests to specific servers in the back end based on information in the request URI: pattern, query string, domain, source and destination IP addresses, and so on.

  • Content-based routing

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to route HTTP/S requests to specific servers in the back end based on contents within a request. This way, web service requests such as XML or JSON can be easily routed to specific origin servers based on specific elements within the body content. Content-based routing is enabled by default.

  • Request rate acceleration

    Administrators can configure the rate at which Oracle Traffic Director increases the load (number of requests) for specific servers in the back end. By using this feature, administrators can allow a server that has just been added to the pool, or has restarted, to perform startup tasks such as loading data and allocating system resources.

  • Connection limiting

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to limit the number of concurrent connections to a server in the back end. When the configured connection limit for a server is reached, further requests that require new connections are not sent to that server.

• Controlling the request load and quality of service

  • Request rate limiting

    Oracle Traffic Director can be set up to limit the rate of incoming requests from specific clients and for specific types of requests. This feature enables administrators to optimize the utilization of the available bandwidth, guarantee a certain level of quality of service, and prevent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

  • Quality of service tuning

    To ensure equitable utilization of the available network resources for incoming requests, you can configure Oracle Traffic Director virtual servers to limit the maximum number of concurrent connections to clients and the maximum speed at which data can be transferred to clients.

• Support for WebSocket connections

  Oracle Traffic Director handles WebSocket connections by default. WebSocket connections are long-lived and allow support for live content, games in real-time, video chatting, and so on. In addition, Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to ensure that only those clients that strictly adhere to R FC 6455 are allowed. For more information, see the section Section 8.4, "Configuring Routes" and the Oracle Traffic Director Command-Line Reference.

• Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware

  • Oracle Traffic Director is designed to recognize and handle headers that are part of requests to, and responses from, Oracle WebLogic Server managed servers in the back end.

  • When an Oracle Traffic Director instance is configured to distribute client requests to clustered Oracle WebLogic Server managed servers, Oracle Traffic Director automatically detects changes in the cluster—such as the removal or addition of managed servers, and considers such changes while routing requests.

  • Patches that Oracle delivers for the Oracle Traffic Director software can be applied by using OPatch, a Java-based utility, which is the standard method for applying patches to Oracle Fusion Middleware products.

• Easy-to-use administration interfaces

  Administrators can use either a graphical user interface or a command-line interface to administer Oracle Traffic Director instances.

• Security

  Oracle Traffic Director enables and enhances security for your IT infrastructure in the following ways:

  • Reverse proxy

    By serving as an intermediary between clients outside the network and servers in the back end, Oracle Traffic Director masks the names of servers in the back end and provides a single point at which you can track access to critical data and applications hosted by multiple servers in the back end.

  • Support for SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0

    To secure data during transmission and to ensure that only authorized users access the servers in the back end, you can configure SSL/TLS-enabled HTTP and TCP listeners for Oracle Traffic Director instances.

    You can either use digital certificates issued by commercial CAs such as VeriSign or generate RSA- and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)-type self-signed certificates with key sizes of up to 4096 bits by using the administration console or the CLI.

  • Web Application Firewalls

    Web application firewalls enable you to apply a set of rules to an HTTP request, which are useful for preventing common attacks such as Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection. The Web Application Firewall module for Oracle Traffic Director supports open source ModSecurity 2.6.

• High availability

  Oracle Traffic Director provides high availability for your enterprise applications and services through the following mechanisms:

  • Health checks for the back end

    If a server in the back end is no longer available or is fully loaded, Oracle Traffic Director detects this situation automatically through periodic health checks and stops sending client requests to that server. When the failed server becomes available again, Oracle Traffic Director detects this automatically and resumes sending requests to the server.

  • Backup servers in the back end

    When setting up server pools for an Oracle Traffic Director instance, you can designate a few servers in the back end as backup servers. Oracle Traffic Director sends requests to the backup servers only when none of the primary servers is available. This feature ensures continued availability even when some servers in the back end fail.

  • Failover for load balancing

    Two Oracle Traffic Director instances can be deployed in an active-passive or active-active configuration. If the primary Oracle Traffic Director instance fails, the backup instance takes over.

  • Dynamic reconfiguration

    Most configuration changes to Oracle Traffic Director instances can be deployed dynamically, without restarting the instances and without affecting requests that are being processed.

• Monitoring statistics

  Administrators can monitor a wide range of statistics pertaining to the performance of Oracle Traffic Director instances through several methods: the administration console, the command-line interface, and a report in XML format.

• High performance

  • SSL/TLS offloading

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured as the SSL/TLS termination point for HTTP/S and TCP requests. This reduces the processing of overhead on the servers in the back end.

  • Content caching

    Oracle Traffic Director can be configured to cache (in its process memory) content that it receives from origin servers. By caching content, Oracle Traffic Director helps reduce the load on servers in the back end and helps improve performance for clients.

  • HTTP compression

    Administrators can configure Oracle Traffic Director instances to compress the data received from servers in the back end and forward the compressed content to the requesting clients. This feature improves the response time for clients connected on slow connections.

• Virtualization-enabled solution

  Oracle Traffic Director can be deployed as a virtual appliance on cloud and virtual platforms.

  After deploying Oracle Traffic Director as a physical application, you can create a virtual appliance from an Oracle Traffic Director instance or create an assembly containing multiple such appliances. You can then deploy the appliance or assembly on the Oracle Virtual Machine hypervisor. To enable such a deployment, Oracle provides an Oracle Traffic Director plug-in as part of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder, a tool that you can use to build virtual appliances and assemblies from physical applications.

  For more information about creating and deploying virtual assemblies containing Oracle Traffic Director instances, see the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder User's Guide.

• TCP load balancing

  With TCP load balancing, Oracle Traffic Director accepts client connections and routes the requests to a pool of servers running TCP-based protocols.