Servers

Servers or Composable Architecture Platform servers are each instances of the X Engine or a database server. There are six types of servers: test, production, Multi-Protocol, database, template, and production with forwarder.

Test servers

Test servers are used to validate a rule set before it is deployed into production. Test servers can take and process a data file containing test data extracted from a production server or manually created.

Afterwards, performance data from the test server can be used to validate that a particular rule set performed as planned.

Production servers

Production servers are capable of taking a data feed from any number of sources, such as a Web Service, a HTTP request or a data file placed in a folder. Production servers continue running once started and are continuously waiting for data.

Multi-Protocol servers

Multi-Protocol servers are servers that are capable of intercepting one or more standard network protocols and breaking them down for analysis by the Composable Architecture Platform.

They differ from Production servers in that they can take data directly from the network layer without interpretation and can then pass that data through a set of protocol rules and proxy that same (or altered) data to a protected server.

The response from the protected server follows a similar path (with retained visibility of the original request).

Database servers

Database servers do not have X Engines installed and do not show up as Composable Architecture Platform Servers as such. They can however be defined as servers so that JDBC connections to them can be specified.

Template servers

Template servers are used as "parents" for other servers. This allows settings such as web proxy settings and mail server settings to be inherited by other servers and reduces the maintenance load for large clusters.

Production servers with forwarders

This refers to a group of production servers that have a built in forwarding proxy controlled by Composable Architecture Platform. These servers also have the capability to enable a browser proxy so that the forwarders can be used for testing rules against applications.

Hardware servers versus Composable Architecture Platform servers

It is important not to confuse a Composable Architecture Platform server instance with a hardware server instance. A single hardware server can run many Composable Architecture Platform servers at once.