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Upgrading Play 1.0 applications without downtime

author image Nicolas Leroux

22 Mar 2010

min read

playframework apache web-applications en

You have your Play 1.0 application deployed on production. It is a real success and you have loads of users. You are really happy, and because Play! is quite fast you do not have any performance issues yet :) However, you are receiving feature requests. Being agile developers, you implement them quickly, test them in acceptance and you are ready to let your users enjoy them. But, your web applications is so successful that you do not really want to plan any downtime…

Tough choice: new features to keep your users happy or 100 per cent uptime? Well it is quite simple to do both using Play! This is because Play! is fully stateless.

My Play! web applications always use a front end proxy. Apache being the most popular I will illustrate how to do it with this web server. The basic idea is to run two Play! instances of your web application and let the front-end proxy load-balance them. In case one is not available, it will forward all the requests to the available one.

Let’s start our the same Play! application, deployed two times: one on port 9999 and one on port 9998.

What I actually did is to copy the my application two times and to edit the application.conf in the conf directory to change the port numbers.

For each web application directory:

play start mysuperwebapp

Now, let’s configure our Apache web server to have a load balancer.

In Apache, I have the following configuration:

<VirtualHost mysuperwebapp.com:80>
  ServerName mysuperwebapp.com

  <Location /balancer-manager>
    SetHandler balancer-manager

    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from .mysuperwebapp.com
  </Location>

  <Proxy balancer://mycluster>
    BalancerMember http://localhost:9999
    BalancerMember http://localhost:9998 status=+H
  </Proxy>

  <Proxy *>
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow From All
  </Proxy>

  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass /balancer-manager !
  ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:9999/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:9998/
</VirtualHost>

The important part is balancer://mycluster. This declares a load balancer. The +H option means that the second Play! application is on stand-by. It will take over if the first one fails. This is exactly what I want.

Every time I want to upgrade mysuperwebapp, here what I am doing:

play stop mysuperwebapp1

The load-balancer then forwards everything to mysuperwebapp2. In the meantime I update mysuperwebapp1. Once I am done:

play start mysuperwebapp1

And I can now safely update mysuperwebapp2 the same way.

Apache also provides a way to view the status of your cluster. Simply point your browser to /balancer-manager to view the current status of your clusters.

Because Play! is completely stateless you do not have to manage sessions between the two clusters. You can actually easily scale to more than two Play! instances. As we have seen, that is really easy to do.

Happy Play!

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